A strange month

God, this month seems to have whizzed by on certain weeks and seems to have passed by in the slow lane in a week in the middle, here and there. Fimh has been prodding me for two weeks to write a post and now I’ll write a bit. It beats being obsessive over a brochure outline or a new website or a workshop powerpoint presentation or sitting and brooding over what is to be in the coming days and weeks and whether I will or will not get any calls for workshops or worrying over other stuff or puzzling over the last month. The last month makes me wonder actually – which makes me wonder all the more in a way, because a little over four months ago I was sure that my sense of wonder was broken and quite lost. Strange sleep dreams and different waking ones even came about in this month. But I don't think people will believe this. They'll call me abnormal or strange if not unhinged and loony. Anyhow.

Strange with a beat...

The last four weeks and four days really seem to have been conjured up by some strange, capricious, unpredictable, hard-headed and inscrutable God. I would even go so far as to say a ‘loving’ God but I don’t want to be presumptuous and so I’ll stay quiet about that. I had a second semi-homecoming when I least expected it. I had incomparable, exquisite moments of conversation, companionship, quiet and even crazy times with my best friend. I worked in moments of trance to type up and collate material for a workshop. I kept at getting a few toes, a booted foot or both through the doors of a few educational institutions in the city and country. I got to meet and even chatted with Pupu for a few hasty minutes at her college because I had accidentally left behind some of my belongings, which she had spotted and her dad had sent alongwith her (psst: I wouldn’t ever recommend being careless but whoever knew that  being careless could mean having a brief but delightful encounter?). I even spent a couple of lovely hours listening and chatting and arguing and listening at Suvro da’s place in Calcutta. I started off an introductory workshop on self-development 12 hours later; the best one till date, in over a year.

And then on a Sunday after a rather whozzy morning when I wandered around my place like a ghost that walks with lines from the above song playing in me 'ed, I took out the paints I had bought a few of evenings ago. Not water colours or acrylics or oil paints. I cannot paint like an artist but I can paint walls, doors and windows. So I got out house paints. I had been looking at my place through objective eyes for about a week. I’d looked around and said that the apartment I stay in is hardly The Ritz but that aside the doors needed fresh paint. So I went about painting the doors. I’d completely forgotten how nice it feels to paint with roller brushes and a big fat paint brush where the only aim is to cover the piece nice and well but not too thick and not too thinly. I was reminded of scenes from the original The Karate Kid where the Sensei teaches the kid the master strokes of the ancient martial arts through the art of painting walls. I didn’t master the strokes of the martial arts but I had a rather meditative time painting the doors in the contained anticipation that a particular Somebody might just come and visit, if even for a bit. There was a bit of a mishap when what I had seen as being a soothing saffron turned out to be a shrieking yellow but then a mix of white did the trick. But the painting, among other things, got me wondering: I’d much rather quietly paint doors rather than do the ten hundred things that people seem to love these days. That goes for socializing to pub-hopping to gobbling huge quantities of food every weekend to coyly flirting and facebooking their ten hundred pictures to show how pretty or ‘cool’ or ‘hot’ or  good looking they are or being 'busy' with 'work' that neither brings in a lot of money or any prospects of more money nor fulfills some meaning or purpose in life. I was also reminded of a news piece. I don’t read newspapers regularly. I keep meaning to and sometimes I manage to buy a paper when I’m outdoors but otherwise apart from two years in college when I read the newspaper cover to cover every day – I don’t regularly read the news. However the news piece I read was commented upon by both Suvro da and Pupu and when I’d been glancing through the papers – the piece had indeed caught my attention because it was so ludicrous but so apposite for the times: it was about a bored and depressed billionaire. If I were to go along with that bit I would digress too much. But to keep it short:  I couldn’t help thinking that the bored and depressed billionaire would have a good time if even he decided to paint his doors and walls or buy a piano and get tuitions on how to play or take music lessons or painting lessons or take some special friend out for a thumping good vacation or...well, let that be.  I was reminded of one conversation between Pat and Robby in Three Comrades where they rue over the fact that the wrong sort of people seem to have so much of money and about Modesty and Willie on how they use money to good ends – well, to be honest, Modesty has very clear ideas on that and about money; Willie, while he does have crystal clear ideas about one aspect of life, he isn’t very clear-headed about the money part till Modesty spells it out for him. So much about house painting and life and living. One more thing: I wouldn’t recommend distemper for new timers (I've tried that) but plastic paints are nice to paint with. And these days, they have pretty and different designs that one can try out on walls with pre-made stencils although I think people can make their own designs too.

Would I recommend the translation of the lyrics that appear on the screen? - nope. No. I love the whole version without the translations. That goes back to a memory.

Then it was in the middle of the week and I’d been loping about the house – doing this and that. It was one of the random days that I was in the house, and I got a surprise that didn’t even belong to the box of my often-times fantastical imagination. In the midst of hunting for a work-file, from 10.30 in the morning the day changed into one of those exceptionally rare and perfect dream sequences, which is like a unique snowflake. I ran out of doors making sure I had my phone and was wearing decent clothes. Before I knew what was happening – I had a perfect tour of the Jadavpur University campus. One of the finest moments for me was looking in on a classroom where Suvro da had taught a class as a Master’s student, which he pointed out to me. I’d been wondering about that class and scene and for more than a couple of years. Suvro da wondered about one professor and how he could be still around. The professor’s door had a lock and it did say ‘Out’ but there was his name in its real presence on the door. We stood around one balcony in the Economics department, talking, which overlooks one section of the campus which has a small gazebo. I wondered whether that structure had been there thirty years ago. Suvro da's car, in one of those strange co-incidences, was parked right across from where we stood and seemed to be winking at Suvro da. A little later, we crossed the road for some tea. And even I could see that the place couldn’t have changed much in thirty years. There was a feisty dog there which insisted on standing in the middle of the road and barked noisily at a car which had hardly touched it. I scolded the dog while Suvro da grinned and remarked that the dog liked to live dangerously. The doggy poo-poohed a biscuit which was given to him but went over to the other side of the road to gobble up some food that was laid out for him. I liked my biscuit. The very young chap manning the tea-stall, upon Suvro da's chatting with him, said with a smile that it must have been his grand-dad who had been manning the counter thirty years ago. It was back to the campus and I could almost see the place in my mind’s eye and in sudden scenes from more than thirty years ago with the students just a year younger telling their batch-mates to move aside because ‘Suvroda’ was coming in. I had been worrying like a worried hen about the hour and a half and yet before I knew it – it had zoomed by and rather too soon. We sat under a tree chatting, watched the students and their doings, the walls with posters and messy graffiti, had a Pepsi, saw the dark thunderclouds spread across the sky and took shelter under the roof of what is called ‘Worldview’ when the rains came down for a bit, and chatted and chatted in-between in bits and pieces and some more little bits which needed some more pieces to fill in more bits of the 'over-sized brain twisting jigsaw puzzle'. But maybe, so Fimh claims, I can look forward to some other times. Pupu came in soon after her exams were over with her new friends. A couple of her friends were more talkative than the rest and Suvro da rattled off all he knew about Pupu’s friends and they looked delighted and a little amazed that he knew and that Pupu had told him about them.  I grinned with a quietly blissful contentment inside my head. It was off to have lunch after that. I had one of my favourites – momos. It was one of the nicest momos but I think that was because of the company...One of Pupu’s lively friends dubbed me ‘Pishimoni’. Pupu didn’t miss out on remarking on that with a laughing spark in her eyes. That certainly was a first. We visited one part of Pupu’s department. I was looking at the posters. We walked around and I tried not to worry about Suvro da and his straining his leg, which made me somewhat like the boy from Aldous Huxley's tale of the boy with the 'magic carpet' and the purple cow. I didn't nag him too much, I hope. In some moments with the way he was moving around, I might have almost forgotten that he had a leg which was still hurting. There was an insistent man, I remember, on the ground floor of Pupu's department who was selling hand made cards and coconut sweetmeats. In a sing-song voice, he was telling folks about his ill mother and about being an ex-student of Jadavpur. He latched onto Suvro da and Suvro da bought some stuff from him. The very discomfiting man rather reminded me of the Sherlock Holmes story of the man who used to pretend to be a beggar. Some kids who were trying to raise money for some political cause had also zoned in on Suvro da much earlier, I remembered, and Suvro da had talked with one of the kids and handed out some money to one who had smiled hugely and seemingly gratefully. Pupu admitted to buying lots of joss sticks from another such sad sort of seller because she had felt terribly sorry for the person and then distributing the joss sticks amongst some of her friends later. None of Pupu’s friends wanted to have coffee after our lunch and look-around, but I always do and when Suvro da asked me whether I did – I said a huge ‘yes’. So we sat around with some coffee and I suddenly told Pupu and her friend about the great big husky that I have encountered across the last year and more on my work-trips down South. And then the snowflake of a day walked on a bit for a little while longer in a most unpredictable manner.

Then there was the superb trip to Durgapur on Friday with Suvro da in the front seat and in his car, Earl Grey. The very relaxed and competent driver, on a couple of occasions, raised even my heartbeat with his overtaking tactics. I almost got up from my seat once and the only thing that stopped me was the image of Suvro da telling me not to engage in back-seat driving! But God be blessed – Suvro da told Feroze, his driver, to take it easy. The highway which I have encountered on more than a few occasions on the bus looked completely different in Earl Grey and it was fairly free of traffic. It looked beautiful and my eyes were fixed on the highway, for the most part, almost like I were the one who was driving. The highway reminded me of those highways from the US apart from the lorries which insisted on driving left of centre. I think the only other difference might have been is that I would have been driving…and the kaashphool which I spotted in one sudden beautiful moment – the first of the season. With his eyes, Suvro da wondered aloud about the trees on the left-hand side which weren't as lush as the ones on the right - I was willing to overlook that till he pointed it out. Suvro da pointed out to the stretch that he normally drives, and I could visualize that quite clearly. I didn’t even notice when Earl Grey had turned into Smoky and was doing over 75m/hr. Suvro da cautioned the driver and I looked at the speedometer and did a calculation and cheered Smoky and patted and petted him in my head. I was reminded of a trip across the Appalachians while driving a truck, somehow. I won’t go into the reasons. Sometime in the middle, I pensively wondered aloud to Suvro da about the goats on the divider of the highway who were busily and happily chewing grass and Suvro da pointed out very seriously that the goats knew about the road-signs and could read them. I was in fits while in the back-seat and tried to stop the noisy laughs. Every now and then I could see the mountains loom in the distance. I was almost expecting them to appear but that didn’t happen this time. It was perfect nonetheless. At Shaktigarh, there was a mini-stop and I debated about lighting a cigarette. I debated about it too long. We got tea. Suvro da chatted with Pupu on the phone while I was trying to encompass my sometimes bizarre trips to and fro and this one and observing Smoky and contemplating objectively about some other stuff. Before I knew it – it was time to get back in Smoky. I tried getting a few puffs of a smoke in between – I might as well have avoided it. The last stretch passed by in a flash – even Panagarh went by in a blur. I’ve never missed the Airforce base – this was the first time that I did. It was also the first time that I didn’t doze off and wasn't in any mood to doze. And there it was – the Muchipara crossing rose into the distance and we were back before too long and after lunch and not without one round of impassioned scolding. Suvro da was clearing out cobwebs from his classroom even before he gave himself time to sit for a bit. I've been kicking myself for forgetting I had a working camera for the various trips. 

The monsoons are over but this is one song which insists on edging its way in: it was dedicated to a person who survived in spite of being hit by lightning more than once.

This is a long enough post, so Fimh seems to be saying, although there is more I can think and write about and even more I could ask about. But I shall depart for the nonce. Oh, and one more thing...'oh, okay - I'm going, I'm going!' I'm being huddled out now.