A Storm

A storm came through in the morn', and what a storm it was.

I woke up fairly early and after a bit put the coffee on and gave my cats their food, and was looking out of the window thinking it looked different outside while prowling around the house wondering whether to go out for a walk. Lit an incense stick and was half-distracted but shut my eyes and said what I do, grinned, opened them, and walked back to check on the coffee when I could feel a golden haze filling the bedroom, and streaming out of it. I go in there, not knowing what I'll see, and through the windows there's this bright yellow streaming in - a bizarre yellow, which would be perfectly normal - but only in a paint-box. And it wasn't just the sky. The whole air was filled with this brilliant yellow-grey shimmery haze. Almost a liquid molten yellow and grey fuzzy light. I ran outside. It was warm, balmy and utterly motionless, and there was the storm. The smell of the storm. And it filled the air. After putting out some food for the stray cat, I hopped back in. It was barely 6.30 or so and I wondered whether I should race through the coffee and smoke, and race to the bridge. The lightning forks from the bridge look mesmerizing. One second there's nothing and then it's not a sudden flash of light that fills the sky but those unbelievably precise and perfect, sharp and random forks criss-crossing one spot in the overhanging northern sky, and then that crack and sometimes a crackle fills the space. And then another. And another. It's almost as if the skies put out an incomparable private show for any lone observer on the bridge. Today, I stayed put. Not so sure why. Got my coffee and not some seconds later the storm came, and I don't remember the last time I saw and heard a storm like this. Great mighty crackles, loud distant and near booms of thunderclaps rent the air and the rain when it came it came down like a straight and furious sheet. There was not a trace of the wind today, and the rain fell in thousands and millions of fast and furious lines. The windows stayed open. And the storm reigned until the rain became a steady murmur with the flash and some grumblings of thunder.

Finally, by the time I did go out for a walk in the morning - the storm had completely disappeared as though it had never really come. No sign of it. Not a drop of rain either. Just a sparkling lit-up darkish greyness draped the air, the skies, the roads, and the empty space, and the trees looked greener and richer. The rolling hills up east weren't alive with the sound of music though....I don't know whether they had come alive with the music of the stormy rains. I forgot to look. I meant to. I meant to wander around the trail in one weird little hill or the hidden one. But I completely forgot. I had already bought my cigarettes, forgotten to buy the bread, walked right past the hills, forgot to look but remembered to come back home.

P.S: Oops...I accidentally almost deleted this post while making some edits and in trying to add a P.S. Let the to-be P.S remain for another day.

A date in June

Some dates here and there through the year rustle around in the head and sometimes even if I forget, something in me always remembers or sometimes tries not to (which is not quite possible).

Our ICSE results were declared on this date, 19 years ago. I got 5 points in Math (a 50%)and 1 in English (over 90), and everything in between. I’d thought I was going to flunk Math actually, and it’s good that I hadn’t bombed English because I’d been threatened with dire consequences, particularly since I’d absolutely refused to even entertain any discussions regarding English tuitions after one point. I’d almost managed a two-pointer in Bengali and it’s a good thing I hadn’t because a neighbourhood friend had let me know in no uncertain terms that she would have personally sent a note to the ICSE Board saying that they had a made an egregious error if I had managed an 80 with my non-existing skills in my native language. Pity still because I was so horrified with the mark-sheet that all urgings to go over to a friend’s place the same day fell on a locked door and deaf ears.

Unlike the ICSE results over which I had no control, I voluntarily chose this date as an option when I took the GREs so many years ago (Jesus Christ! I can't believe it's been ten years exactly). And with my luck I had two Math sections (which I'd been expecting so it wasn't a surprise). And even though other people will vehemently disagree, Math didn't go too badly (I had practiced sums like a possessed lunatic for two months and more - getting up in the middle of the night to solve the simplest of math problems, which flew over my head and which others would have solved in their sleep), and the verbals were about okay but it was the analytical section (which at that point had those lovely puzzles and logical games that one had to solve) that I bombed much to my amazement, and for an entire evening I sulked in the dark because my total wasn't what I had been expecting and was worrying for different reasons but was later on blessedly relieved when the person in charge of the coaching centre in Calcutta where I was all set to teach at that point said that of course I could come and teach as long as I could if I wanted to, and so I did until I was set to come here (for the first time), and had mistakenly imagined back then that I'd never again have to borrow a penny from anybody ever again.

Last year I was glum on this date without knowing why and a friend cheered me up by getting me to talk about a book-series that had caught my utter fancy at that point and so I’d rambled on and on about the book-series and forgot that I’d been feeling glumpy till later.

I had insisted that I would get married on this date some years ago – that almost but then didn’t quite happen. I did marry but on a different date....

There were some birthday parties I’d gone to too on this date it must have been that swing in. And memorable parties they had been too. And different from the wild uncontrollable parties that were the norm back then (put twenty or so girls in a room and they can break or bend a bed out of shape by the end of the evening and if nobody ends up with a pair of broken glasses or some bad bruises everybody can pat each other on the back).

One time there was 'Musical Chairs', and I had to win. I remember being fairly sick for that entire day with a raspy, swollen throat (even though I certainly didn’t smoke back then) but I wasn’t going to give my favourite friend’s party a miss. And when game-time came around I jumped up. And right till the last round it was my friend and I who were the last men standing (rather the last girls sitting, should I say?)…and in the very last round it was my friend who won…I actually think I cursed once and stamped my foot angrily before I saw my friend’s face and felt a little less bad at having lost and somewhat guilty too. I don’t know exactly why I’d wanted to win so badly and who knows whether the suspicion I have has any factual basis. But that was a nice party. In the evening though it was and there was a darkness there which hovered, which I don’t know how to explain (maybe the party unlike other times came to an end too soon for my liking), and I was quite sick late at night back in my room when everyone was asleep but still – a memorable party it had been.

At another quiet party there is only one memory, which has stuck on. This too is a dark memory - but I honestly think it's because the power had gone out and we were sitting in candle-light or maybe a lantern or something. The game of 'guessing the word' from the clue provided. A friend got to hear the word whispered to her, and I was supposed to guess. That didn't go as planned. She said, "of great height...' I looked up into the air and said, 'mountains'....which was met with quiet but not unkind laughs and smiles because I guess everybody else had already guessed the damn word. The friend hissed and said, 'a person of great height - ' to which I quickly responded with, 'a giant?' That was the best I could come up with. I gave up after that point. After mountains and giants my head wasn't going to come up with anything else, and I don't remember whether the friend had exasperatedly provided me with a third clue. It turned out that the word had been a simple 'tall'....I had grumbled of course but could come up with no better 'clue'.

One of the parties – I can’t quite remember whether it was the summer that we moved from Class VI to VII or from VII to VIII – is still the sunniest party that I remember attending (and I have attended a fair number of parties since although over the last some years I have not). There were party hats and eye masks and lovely games organized by the didi and dadas. There was the 'paper dancing game' (you know, dancing on a square of newspaper which you keep folding up into smaller and smaller pieces and the partners who manage to survive the smallest bit without having their feet off the paper are the winners), and it was accompanied by many giggles and laughs and fits, and I’m sure some of the partners were eliminated simply because they laughed too much and missed the spot. I still remember which pair won the game and of course I remember who my dancing partner was (we didn’t win though). There was the 'memory game', which I always thought I should be good at but knew I wasn’t. I got very excited when the tray came into sight and tried to remember a list of things instead of looking carefully, and so quite promptly forgot all I'd seen as soon as the tray was whisked away and I imagined things not there or things which seemed likely to have been there. But the word jumble. Now that was a different matter. And till this day I’m ashamed to say that I cheated in the game. I did. There was this word that I still remember on which I cheated. ‘Memsur’ it said. And my annoying mind kept saying something like, ‘haha…it almost looks like a form of addressing both female and male or a monsieur gone wrong ’. I could almost but not quite see the real word, got increasingly annoyed and yet nothing came to my head, and then while standing in the queue I remember nudging a friend’s sister (who was at least a couple of years younger and...well, sharper...), and she said, ‘that’s summer, Shilpi-di’, and I said ‘of course’ and jotted it down. I was even placed third in the game and by then I was too embarrassed and ashamed to say that I’d cheated in a game. But it was a very sunny party otherwise inspite of my evil act (the only thing I couldn’t do is bring home the prize gotten by dishonest means). And we had a perfect lunch and that lovely ice-cream for the first (and last time - I never did have it again!)…Dr. Frost’s frozen cake ice-cream for dessert. Boy it was good! - and not just the ice-cream. There were lots of laughs and some perfect moments at that party….even a couple of fights and tempers that flew around, I remember…but what I remember most is the rippling laughter and the dancing sun and the light wind flying around and bouncing around in that space.

A random thought comes wandering in: I sometimes feel like a very ancient, befuddled person caught in a time-warp even though I'm never given to feeling even the slightest bit nostalgic about my growing up years. I suddenly wonder what I'd see if I went to some party for a 13 year-old here or back in India, and I wonder whether the games I've talked about would sound to a regular 13 year-old of today as though they are out from the early Stone Age days.These days, I hear there are 'party-planners' for hire...

Anyway, so much for an old bag of memories - exams, an-almost-marriage-date, birthdays and birthday parties - regarding a date in June. They're not sad memories though - seen out of context, in a way - though they might not seem terribly relevant or important.....

...come to think of it the title is somewhat misleading. Ha-ha.

Selves....

Do some of our selves die? I wonder. Do some just hibernate below? Do some lie dormant? Are we reminded of a self here and there - ones that we never knew existed until some random and a very mundane act like spilling some oil on the bathroom counter brings in thoughts of conquerers, monarchs, queens, emperors and rulers, and the spilling realisation of a very real but never-to-be-expressed self, which makes perfect intuitive sense and that which lies buried under the sands of time?

How many selves do regular individuals carry around, I wonder. And the thing is if one notices carefully one finds perfectly contradictory selves existing within this seemingly single walking physical self. Sometimes - or maybe most of the times - to remain a working and walking and regular human being one has to kind of raise one's mammothine eyebrows in a superior way or simply shoo some odd bits of a very odd self away. One doesn't associate with such a self, the one there can't really be, and there is no point in letting that other self express itself given the external world that one inhabits.

Sometimes, a self just seems to be at odds with one's regular socially quiet, indeed sometimes diffident and also awkward self. One doesn't just go and dance on a public dance-floor even if one can dance. No, no. Most certainly not if even one cannot stop one's feet, hidden by the table, from drumming on the floor.

And yet others seem sort of unfavourable to the cautious and nervy self....What?! Leap across that log there and the other one here and then go through those bushes and shrubs and those woods, and God-knows-what-else, and half clamber and climb, slither and slide up and down and up and down again some fifteen feet of an undulating slope of a sandy, crumbly and extended bank to get down to those rocks down below so that we can sit there and hear the waters of that tiny creek. Are you mad?!...well, sometimes it doesn't sound or seem that mad, after all. And one can do that. One is perfectly capable of doing the same, and there aren't strangers or wild animals wandering around, and it might be nice. And so one does. And it is.

And yet there are all these selves and even befuddling desires that live there/here somewhere....and some seem quite normal...

A self that wants to go exploring (physically real) places, the self that wants (even at the middle-age of 35) to learn how to ride a motor-bike (yeah right), the self that wants to fly a bi-plane once, the self that wants to pack a bag and go off to the mountains for a weekend, a self that wants to go for a long drive on the highway, the self that wants to walk into the waves of a sea, the self that wants to learn how to dance well (nothing but the tango will do), and sometimes wants to dance and slide along the dance-floor and end on one's knees (just for the heck of it), a self that wants to go and casually pick out a bottle of wine (not expensive - just a regular bottle of wine from even the grocery store will do), the self that wants to go spend a day wandering around at the Art Institute and along the lake in a near-enough city, the self that doesn't care too much if the rolled up jeans get soaking wet in the waters of the river, a self that wants to run with abandon and absolute focus and as fast as it can (just to see how fast it can run), the self that misses unheard stories, a self that wants to laugh, be funny and crack silly jokes, the self that wants to take a walk by the river after midnight and sit by it, another self that wants to listen to some music without thinking of anything, one self that knows it could learn how to play the piano if it went and learnt (makes me smile wryly this one), the self that wonders about stories that won't be written, one self that wants to read plays out-loud through an evening or two, the self that wants to splash water and tread water and swim through a stream or natural pool, a glimmering self that is at the very least quite wild and would gladly test the waters, and so many other odder selves and desires....

- Who knows where these and more come from (or why indeed some are still hanging around), and some of them have distinctly mad and odd desires - or maybe not. Maybe they're perfectly normal and ordinary actually - so they sometimes seem to be to me - and yet contradictory they certainly are. Some feel peculiarly masculine and yet others oddly feminine, some seem ambiguous, some indefinable. Whatever they are, they don't go away and one recognizes them, and if one is walking along the road when one sees the mental-image of one's self wanting or doing something that is unusual one can tuck one's head down and smile. Sometimes they quarrel and argue and fight amongst themselves and all, and all one can do is roll one's eyes and glare violently at the sidewalk and keep walking furiously while waiting for all of them to quieten or calm down or resolve the matter somehow. When the greatly unusual selves rain down upon one's senses one doesn't really know what is going on, and sometimes the mind very rationally reasons: it can't be possible to be this and that and the other; to want both this and that and the other. Choose. Make a choice. Even in your head, and if not, contrary choices must go out of the window. Throw them out but they come back in and then they stir. And oddly enough the older I grow the more I feel these strange selves, impulses and desires being sparked ever so often into life (surely, it can't just be mid-life crisis; surely, it can't just be my madness) - strange because one had either forgotten that they had existed or because one really had never known or because they are contradictory. And some will not be ignored, and after being reminded so many times over - one cannot ignore them; not all the time anyway, and they don't want to be forgotten.... Maybe one here and another there do happily disappear. The self that was convinced and had almost all the other selves convinced that it was born to lord over the rest of them and be an expressed messiah has not died a bloody death but has silently merged with a couple of other selves, and is certainly not complaining.

What gets expressed in the external world is another thing. I can see that. That is what happens. Through the course of living. Through everyday life. And sometimes a self pops out for a bit with great excitement and doubt as well, and then disappears because it doesn't make sense for it to hang around on the surface while another bursts upon the surface, and causes anger/annoyance/pain and then goes under, and bubbles. Others stay and on the prominent surface. The grim and grinning, tenacious academic self (why has this one survived this long? - but thank heavens it has and may it live), the irritant, the social hermit of a self, the nuisance, the quiet and noisy lunatic (the quiet one feels quite sane at times), the compulsive self, the desultory writer, the aggravatingly mindless self, the harum scarum reader, the fast walker, the incredibly slow self, the worrier, the introspector, the warrior, the distracted music lover, the thinker, the ascetic, the arrogant snob, the awkward animal, the nitpicking philosopher, the loner, the observer, the obsessor, and others, and they come with their quirks and all - sometimes they seem to be complete personalities. And some selves don't make too much profound sense really nor do some desires but they wickedly, playfully and/or gleefully gleam, taunt and tease one from under the surface, and others do (make sense) in bizarre ways. A couple or three or more or so when they're thrown at one - they end up catching one's breath and....raising a lazy smile even.

How does it work?

"Some problems - read, pain and suffering of the human condition - don't go away". That visualized statement, which mushroomed in my head made my grim and solemn self chuckle some days ago. I won't even try explaining that most obvious sounding statement.

But that got me wondering about something - a couple of them being:

How is it that some people do not seem to care too much about the consequences or the outcome of their work (however defined...), and yet seem to have things working out well and nicely? And how is it that some people seem to breeze through life quite gaily without being attached to anything or anyone around them or just perhaps mildly?....Or is it that I'm brooding and looking at life through gloomy lenses? And discounting my nought but stubborn mind and my other loon(vel)y senses...?

And to answer a question, after waking up in the morn - would I really ha'e bin? Happier, *gay and merrier in them other folks' skin? My head may be *queer and it has a mind of its own, but when was the last time it felt miserably alone?

But my self's not happy for what does it bark?

"It's not just about you is it, unless you're a deep sea shark? Stuck in one place for ten years and more and you won't even walk out of the blasted door? You've known what you have for ten years too and you're thinking of things that deserve a 'moo'?! The world never changes and it with its real humans stays the same but you keep imagining away suffering and pain? Of six billion or of *one, what difference does it make? You need to do what you can - for heaven's sake."

...So much for a post which isn't twenty-seven miles long, and isn't about nature walks, or poems - not even a song.

P.S: and about the stars/asterisks: used in the 'original' senses. No other meaning alluded (to) or implied! And the third one refers to the Self/Spirit/Soul - call it what one will - not to 'one billion'. My crabby (and finicky) self insisted on mentioning these bits just to keep things clear and clean.

Easter Sunday: Past, Present....Future?

Happy Easter.

And for Easter there shall be a post - it cannot be helped. And maybe even a poem link - that too cannot be helped.

Some years ago, 7 to be precise, on Easter Sunday a friend of mine Beth and I went over to a place - which at that point seemed to be at least 47 miles away from Lafayette. It's not that far off. It's probably 20 miles possibly from the other side of the river. A place called Wild Cat Creek. We got there very, very early in the morning and it was a mild spring day - a little cold possibly but only that tingle of a cold that comes with early dawn. We went there armed with huge cups of gas-station coffee and a doughnut each and some books in our bags. It's a quiet place, that place. A little creek flows through and on the other side there were the dark green sylvan woods. I had to splash around in the creek at some point but the waters were icy and cold and I hopped around in them still and then had to get out without venturing too far. Dense green - the woods stood on the other side, and I was about to say with a cabin that could be seen hidden by the leaves. But that's not true. I had imagined a cabin there. While sitting on the side of the creek I kept telling Beth that if I could I'd build a cabin and live there on that side and do not much else. I'd have to make sure that the cabin had good plumbing - that's all. I'd cross the creek and go to town to get groceries every ten days or so and I'd do not much else but live in the cabin, which I could see very clearly, and have a private sign to keep all trespassers out because, I think, Beth might have said what if people came to visit. And so there we sat, drank coffee, had our mighty doughnuts. Beth read. I don't know what I did very well but at some point I fell into a deep, deep sleep right next to the creek. I woke up to feel my face crusty and Beth when she looked at me burst out laughing. Beth is normally a quiet person but when she laughs, she laughs. And she did. My face had gotten sunburnt. For it was close to noon and I had been sleeping with my face facing the sun.

We spent some more time there. I don't know what we did or whether we spoke much or at all or whether Beth read her book and I scribbled in a diary or read or not but it was what it was. And later on we'd gone and had some sandwiches for lunch. The evening before we'd gone to a church around the corner from where I now live. The evening service hadn't begun, which was good because I'd just wanted to sit quietly and not listen to anyone speaking. Just look around and look at Jesus Christ on the Cross and so that's what I did. And I didn't want to ask for anything but I kept asking him to give me the courage on Easter Sunday. That was all. Although I kept thinking later that I'd told Christ that He must let things work out for the better right then and there. We sat there, Beth and I, for a long while. I had my own lack of thoughts but there were swiveling bursts around in my mind...I wanted to feel peaceful. I wanted to feel calm. I wanted to feel certainty. But none of that happened, I don't think. I kept sending Christ some happy messages though hoping that he was doing well no matter where He was. How on earth do human beings so matter-of-fact-ly nail someone to the Cross and so many of them and him too? It was 'round the same time that I was still reading The Last Temptation of Christ I remember and having a very difficult time...anyhow, we sat there and then got up and had a young priest come over and smiling with quiet restraint he told both Beth and me to come over to Mass later on or on Sunday. I think I may have answered or grunted or smiled.

It's an Easter weekend which always crops up in my mind now and again....and later sometimes during the year I felt bad not because things didn't work out for the better right away but I honestly thought that Christ, of all people, hadn't heard my prayer. But how could He not? But it wasn't that He hadn't heard....maybe He had heard a little too clearly - who knows. And at some point there was that song playing in my dorm room that year - Turn! Turn! Turn! by The Byrds.
_____

Yesterday, some twenty minutes or so past noon, I stomped out for a walk to a place I'm rather fond of. I'm glad I live in this town with a river so close. It's Spring now and we've been having a lot of rain lately and so the river is in flood and looks different every other day. A place now and then glistens, invitingly. So sometimes trails are found. Sometimes slightly hidden paths are explored with a grin sometimes and sometimes with curiosity and sometimes even hesitatingly. Yester' a new direction was taken up. And rises into vision?...

I'd lived near - right near the river for about a year - some years ago - and I'd never taken so many trips to it. I'd never looked much. I liked it. I felt it but didn't let anything seep in too much. The river yesterday had flooded and submerged the path that runs on the opposite direction to my normal route. I got to the point where the path had gone down under and I wished yet again that I had a working camera. But no camera and so hard luck. I turned back and then noticed that they'd built a proper deck for the canoes and the water boats belonging to the Purdue crew team. I walked out on the wooden planks. Some of them seemed to sway gently - probably my imagination - but out I went to the very edge and looked and looked and loved and grinned even though my heart felt the pangs but a different one from last year....I searched for a cigarette but I'd forgotten my pack! Ack! No point in sitting for too long without a cigarette...when lo and behold - a half cigarette emerged from one of the pockets of my bag. A silent smoke, some more shared half-smiles while looking out into the river and then a quick order: Time to get up and walking. And so I leapt up. I turned around running along lightly along the wooden plank I saw a young boy and girl standing near the deck towards the shoreline...they were waiting there with half-wondering looks on their faces. They grinned. I grinned. I realised then that they'd probably been waiting there waiting for me to head back from the far end of the deck before they went there. You know...it's one of those things. Giving folks some private space even on public land because one doesn't want to intrude. I was grateful rather...

Off to buy cigarettes it was and a trip down into the campus area, and near a middle-eastern restaurant, the pleasant and polite elderly owner was bellowing pleasantly at his sister-in-law's very young kid who was running around in the car park, "Miriam! Miriam! Go back inside. Go back inside." I looked up and he smiled his usual smile at me with the, "How are you?" greeting. He doesn't take no answer. An answer must be provided and so he waits. I nodded and smiled and finally replied and raised the question myself...which was fine actually considering nobody was hurriedly walking around building corners.

In the eve' there was another walking trip and I re-visited The Church, which now rests around my corner, for the first time since that Easter. But evening mass was already on the run and so I waited near the door. It was dark though inside the Church. Only a flickering candle could be seen and I couldn't make out Jesus on the Cross very clearly - only the form. I stood where I was and heard a hymn which I hadn't heard before and it was joyously sung. I waited for a little longer but then a young woman was reading out so badly from a section on Moses that I grimaced and turned around. She really should have practiced reading well. A flat monotone and stumbles over words are not somethings particularly inspiring on Easter Saturday. I wandered a bit around the Church. There was a statue of Mary. A calm statue it was and she was looking not towards the gazer but her gaze was lowered. It was a peaceful statue somehow. And there were three crosses of different heights draped with white cloth. I don't know what the three crosses really symbolized - maybe the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost? - but those three also seemed to fit there somehow even though the space around where I wandered was dark with only the fading natural light making its way in through the glass doors. There was not much else to see there and no other rooms to wander around and so off I went off for my second walk for the day.

I chant still. For every waking moment - I chant while doing whatever it is that I'm doing. I stare too much though, I still think. Stare away into space in front of me. Some shard here is much too precious in life and it is not a matter that brooks much detachment although restraint and balance are indeed matters that require much practice and failing and learning and practice and failing and hopefully some amount of actual practice bit by bit. I try. I do. And I'll try harder - that's an unfailing promise. Some weeks ago - maybe a month it was - it was near a particular stretch of the river that I read in peace a piece on The Buddha's words...who knows what is to be? One can but say Que sera sera...I guess with a half-grin and whatever else within while pausing for a bit to let the present be.

It's Easter and so a poem that once again, yes, my friend on the right sent me many years ago is something that I'm putting up here. Thank you. Maybe some who haven't come across it before might feel the same or similar throbbing within and the pins and needles like icicles on the out upon reading it - and those who already have might like re-visiting it. The poem is appropriately titled Easter, and is well, about the Resurrection. (I had earlier mistaken the poem to be titled Resurrection) and is by John Niehardt. A couple of his other poems that I bond with are 'April, The Maiden' and 'L'Envoi'....

God bless....

Once more the northbound wonder
Brings back the goose and crane,
Prophetic sounds of thunder
Apostles of the rain.

In many a battling river
The broken gorges boom,
behold the Mighty Giver
Emerges from the Tomb!

Now robins chant the story
Of how the wintry sward
Is litten with the glory
Of the angel of the Lord.

His countenance is lightning
And still his robe is snow
As when dawn was bright'ning
Two thousand years ago.

O who can be a stranger
To what has come to pass?
The pity of the Manger
Is mighty in the grass -

Undaunted by Decembers
the sap is faithful yet:
the giving earth remembers
And only men forget.

A Book Post but can that be?

I haven’t written anything that can fill a blog-post and I haven’t written anything that I think can fill a blog-post without considerably alarming me some days or hours later and so I am scribbling usefully elsewhere. Yet I found the below, which I think can fill in as a blog-post. I have no recollection of writing it but didn’t mind re-reading it. From the time-line seems it was written sometime in January 2009 or maybe very late November 2008 maybe, although I can bet on neither. It seems it was written in February 2009 actually. Also, it seems I had an “exciting” time while writing a paper….so maybe such things are possible for some selves.

*******

I think it's time for another whimsical post. I haven't written anything over here in ages – partly because I haven't been able to concentrate on one single theme and carry it along till it's done. The previous post ended up being a little too self-centred than I had intended. There was another post that I had started writing and it was called “Many Hours Later”. I saved it as a draft, and there seemed to be precious little point going back to it for the “Many hours later” slowly became many, many hours and then days and it hardly makes any sense to put it up anymore. Although if truth be told that post, which never got put up and some other bits and pieces fit together to form a last minute paper in the previous semester, which I had an exciting time writing within the space of an eve’, so much so that I promised myself that I would polish it and send it off to some journal – but I haven't done anything of that sort.

So I must write now. Why I must is a road that is best not traveled along for now....

I'd been reading a book awhile ago that Guha had picked out from our public library some weeks ago. Neither one of us had heard of the author or the title, but Guha being so fascinated with fantasy picked it out of the fantasy section while I had been sitting cross-legged in the spirituality section (I never learn), first gaping at the books and wondering which one to pull out from the rack (thankfully enough all the books on Buddhism are on the lowest rack), and was then flicking through one of Dalai Lama's books when Guha came over and said “Look at what I found.” So saying he showed me the book, and said “It's either going to be a really good read or a terribly bad one.” I nodded. For reading the blurb, it seemed that the book had to do with an imagined history of the world, where the western world is wiped out pretty much completely by the plague while the civilizations in India and China flourish, as do the religions of Buddhism and Islam. The book seemed to cover an impressive period of time and it seemed that most of the book was based either in China or in India or both….

Once we came home with our goodies, Guha very kindly offered to let me read the book first because I was eying it wistfully. I immediately liked the author's style of narrating his tale, and he had a tale to tell, and it indeed was historical fiction, where he pretty much introduces the primary characters right at the onset (Temur makes an appearance and dies within the first ten pages or so). I bonded with the characters from the get-go, and they were very well-formed, and I could identify with them. There was a sense of grandeur and godforsaken loneliness as I traveled alongwith the primary character for pages when he was all by himself and when he didn't know whether he was alive or dead because he is within a landscape where all human beings have been wiped out by the plague...but then the author thankfully enough didn't just keep us hanging on near the borders of the twilight zone. Pretty soon yet another one of the primary characters enters the scene...the route of travel is rather vague in my head (that's not just because of my memory but it's also because the map he shows is all skewed)...but they do indeed travel a fair bit through Europe, and across the seas; the two primary characters are sold twice over as slaves, and finally after a particular gruesome incident they end up in China, where one of the primary characters – the younger of the two, has as his single mission to kill off the Chinese emperor. By this time of course I was absolutely hooked onto the book. I knew that my little sense of history was going to be forever warped, and had been ruing over the fact that I remembered so little of world history anyway (although I had loved it in school and in high-school, and one of the subjects along with geography…and weird, physics actually, I think, that I never flunked in), and even though I didn't recognize many of the names (some historical figures keep appearing and then disappearing through the course of the book) – none of that mattered. I was gripped by the tension and the sheer madness of this young black boy (who was the one who was put through something utterly gruesome) who was going to kill off the Chinese Emperor, and it seemed vitally important (!) that he do so, and I couldn't help siding with him and the other primary character who no matter what his inhibitions, had given his absolute trust to the boy, and therefore knew of the mad boy's plans, and was therefore an accessory. So there I was thinking “Oh, my God he's going to pull it off...! He’s going to murder the Emperor! How on earth…!” “…but what's going to happen after this...where are they going to go? What are they going to do? How are they going to get out afterwards?” When galuph! Both of the primary characters die all of a sudden even before I could figure out what was going on...they just die.

Of course I was taken aback. In fact to say I was taken aback doesn’t even begin to describe my emotional state. Sometimes while reading I have to stop. I need to pause. This was not a pause that came about. It was not a moment to let the events unfurl or to let the ideas seep or to let the thoughts collect through my slow mind. No. This was just a rude shock to the system. What was the writer doing? Why was he being so inconsiderate? The book has hardly begun and the two characters are now dead. And I, the reader, had gotten attached to them – need I remind him?...If these two characters were no more then was I supposed to still keep reading?...Anyhow, feeling quite frazzled and grumbling somewhat I got on with the reading…

And this is where the book got mightily interesting, even more interesting than I thought possible. It turns out that these two end up in the bardo. Now I remember reading The Tibetan book of Living and Dying (which is another story for some other day but I can tell you that it got me worried) some four years ago or so (which is another story)....but I don't remember too much about it. I remembered the bit about the bardos, and the stages that one goes through – so I knew what the author was talking about but I didn't quite expect what he threw out at me. Well there they were, the two characters. The older the more patient and quieter and the more balanced one explains to the younger boy how they are a part and have always been a part of the same jati. He scolds the boy and says that the reason that they keep losing him over and over again is because this boy simply refuses to remember or recognize his jati members when he sees them on earth. But the older man is gentle too, and he tells the young boy that he will take him through the different levels of the bardo, and that eventually both of them alongwith the other jati members will pop out into the real world. The boy is willing, unwilling, willing, unwilling, dithering and dallying although he is an exceptionally remarkable character, and at the final moment when they are being thrown out into the real world again – the boy runs away from his jati members because he finds a safe and secure spot (or so he thinks!) within the bardo. Bang. Boom. He's reborn as a tiger prowling – that’s his first memory. That’s his first impression. That’s his first remembrance – that’s where we pick him up...the other primary character does of course meet him...but that's another story.

I won't go through the whole book of course. Telling everyone what happens in every stage. Narrating the whole story from top to bottom. But I will go on with this post.

******

Unfortunately (or fortunately?) enough, that’s where the post ended. It didn’t go on. I didn’t go on with the post. What I was planning to write about for “the rest of the post” I have not the faintest inkling (it may have been to do with the bardos and the meeting and connecting with one's kinsmen). I chanced upon this bit by accident while searching for some soft-copy of an old document transferred from an old, hand-me-down and rather sturdy if somewhat whimsical computer, which croaked its last some years ago. I’d thought the document was something else when I saw the title, which simply said “The years”. I wish I’d had the patience to have written a bit more of the book. Bits of the book sail or fly by every now and again but I remember not much of it and it wasn’t actually the sort of book that one reads through twice….I can’t exactly pin-point the reasons. But yes, the tale does trail over into India…It really is a book worth a read, I think (although I'd have to read it again to figure out whether it should have a place on one's book-shelf). If people can locate it, I think they’d have an interesting time, maybe? It’s called, yes. The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. I have rustled through some of his other books while sauntering through the local library space but none of his other books seem or sound half as captivating.

So there's the Meaning

I think this deserves a post all for itself: for one thing, I don't know whether anyone will have the patience and/or time to travel all the way through that interminably long blog-post. But that last poem I talked about in the never-ending blog-post (even I am alarmed at its length): the meaning and sense flooded into me on the 7th, right before I lit the last fag for the night. There was a somewhat perplexed and half-humorous fimh saying, "Don't you really understand the poem?...How can you not understand the poem?" and I said in my perplexed voice, "No, it's embarrassing...and it's not even about agreeing or disagreeing with what Graves is gravely saying...I just don't get it." Well not so many words were used through the course of the conversation. And then suddenly the meaning flooded in. There was a fair bit of laughter too, if I remember right, before I felt quite sombre for a fair bit. Now I can't believe that I didn't understand the poem for this long and after really trying to understand and now all of a sudden the meaning floods in/is given to me through the single rain-drop of an innocuous question. I think it's bemusing to have the meaning of the poem that has perplexed one for more than 8 years to suddenly be given to one. In this sense I have to say it was like one of those zen poems, at least for me. If I were feeling very buoyant and/or cheeky I would have said that maybe it's a reminder of the grace "Ask and ye shall receive"...but I'm not feeling that non-perplexed...but I certainly feel and express nameless gratitude and love for the grace and even though I understand close to nothing, which has nothing to do with being modest or humble.

P.S: Needless to say, now that I actually understand the poem - I do not agree with the poem, and for multiple reasons too!

A long time thread of a few Poems

I re-read the following through last night, and I was wondering whether to delete the post: it's one mile-long self-obsessed post to write about a handful of poems, and I'm no poet. Anyhow, it's one of the few things that found it's way here and so it'll stay, I guess. At least I changed the title: now it sounds like an honest description for it's not a long poem post but a very long time-thread about a few poems and Julius Caesar pushed its way in...nothing I could do about it. I have made some edits too and I've gone and re-read some of the poems (I had made a mistake about how many soldiers there had been in the Light Brigade and had forgotten the poem's title - most fervent apologies. I also added a joke from the net...). 7/4/2011

I've been wondering what to write about today since I have some time. Many thoughts have come in ....but then I've been thinking of poems for some strange or not so strange reason through the flurry of academic writing that has kept me absorbed in a strange and unusual way for a couple of weeks.

Now poems. Okay. One of the first poems I remember memorizing as a kid of Class II was Home They Brought her Warrior Dead by Walter M. Scott...(No! Tennyson. Tennyson. Lord Alfred Tennyson - gulp. I just about checked days after the 7th). I don't know why I had memorized the poem but it had something to do with school, and I had chosen that poem to recite. We had a fair bit of nice intra-class competitions back then. The poem had made perfect sense to me too, which is what I find rather alarming now. I remember there was a girl, a kind and well-read neighbour, who was probably in high-school back then, and I recited the poem in front of her (so that she could tell me whether I was reciting it right) and while reciting the whole poem in a very sombre tone for the last line "sweet my child, I live for thee!" I had smiled very widely and had at some point thrown my arms around her and she, even though she may have been perplexed, had smiled too. Now the poem when I'm reminded of it (I certainly cannot recite it any longer - I don't remember all the words all the way through) gives me the nightmares, even though right until college I could "see" the sense in it.

There were some other poems in Class II from a Bengali text-book on Vivekananda. I liked the poems: four liner poems which were as clear as day. Remember nothing from them now although one had to do with "saptarshi..." and Vivekananda...

Not to boast - but I could memorize poems when I was a child without any problems. I remember that bit quite clearly. I had to read them through a couple of times and then I really could rattle them off. I must have been a different human being back then (and then from Class VI, my memory started degenerating and rather rapidly...). I remember being scolded too as a kid, once, for not having memorized a poem and so I simply said it out-loud and so that was that. Next came Abou Ben Adham in Class III. I recently got to know (during the writing of the previous post actually) that that poem too is by Leigh Hunt. There were four girls who were practicing for a school performance, and they had been reciting the poem for rehearsals in class everyday. One day I realised I knew the poem myself after listening to them so many times and so I went up to the teacher (who really made no bones about how much she disliked me) and told her that I knew the poem and could I please be in the performance. I rattled it off with a couple of mistakes and to her credit she put me in the play-cum-recital immediately. I was pleased but the poem itself has always perplexed me. Why hadn't Abou Ben Adham's name been on the list in the first place...I never quite got that.

(*Got to read on the net (7/4/2011) that upon the question being raised in an audience: "Why indeed did Abou Ben Adham's name lead all the rest?" Asimov, from the audience, raised his hand, waved it wildly and yelled, "Alphabetical list! Alphabetical List!")

I won't go through the entire list of poems that I learnt but actually there weren't too many...But I remember in class-IV I had an odd book of poems I had gotten from Pondicherry (a couple of years before that). It had this strange assortment of poems. One was called Father Neptune and his Daughters (it felt like it should be a song and I could never recite it for in my head I used to sing it)...and other poems too (the one about children being born on different days and the sort of temperaments that they would have...and so the liner "Thursday's child shows in his eyes that he would soon be very wise" made me quite quietly smug for I had been born minutes past midnight on Thursday, I had been told)...but I don't remember any of the others and neither do I remember the poets. For the next five years for elocution whenever we had to recite a poem - I had my favourites and I used to read poems - funnily enough. There was an old I.C.S.E copy of the Panorama, with many fine poems and I liked reading quite a few of them. I learnt almost all of them in Class V. There was O, Captain, My Captain, A Solitary Reaper and ...Into the Valley of Dead rode the six hundred... The last and the second of the lot I used as my arsenal for elocution exams all throughout my school days when I hadn't prepared anything specifically (which used to happen ever so often and not always with any good reason).

In Class VII, I remember for some reason not remembered I learnt one of Mark Antony's famous pieces...Not the ultra famous one but the one that begins, "O, pardon me thou bleeding piece of earth..." A friend who had the whole Shakespeare collection, if I remember right, selected that piece. I knew nothing of Shakespeare back then or nothing that would fill up more than half a page anyway. I had been quite absorbed in learning that piece though...and was quite solemn too about the whole process but all of that was spoilt with the belligerent yells of either my brother or my friend or maybe both - I forget whose - which let me know that I was pronouncing "butcher" wrong. "Buh-cher!" What's buh-cher?! You're boochering the word!" Showing me a dictionary didn't make any sense because I didn't know how to figure out the pronunciation...but I relented and said the word the way it was supposed to be said (never been able to make peace with it) and all was well (I know I learnt the butcher, the baker and candle-stick maker poem way, way back...only nobody had heard me say it out-loud, I guess...).

In class V, at some point I remember I wrote a very nice poem - even though I say so myself. It was about a playground...and a happy and content and delighted playground it was too, at the beginning at any rate, because there were lots of children who used to come and play there, and there was a merry-go-round and a couple of swings and a slide and some grass and a sand-pit....but then there was doom and the sad playground contemplates upon how none of the children come by any longer....the poem remains no more (and after a bad experience here and there not a single other person knew or cared of what I wrote and stored back then) but the thoughts of that poem remain with me. Another poem begun at the same time never got to the end. It was about meeting a gypsy-man (shows the very hard impression that Enid Blyton had hammered into me with her books and stories...never having met a gypsy-man in my life...) and it rhymed and all and it was about the gypsy man and how he had come in a caravan and how he had deep eyes (don't remember whether he wore a ring in his ear...), and had a delicious secret....and he almost told me about it....but the thing is I couldn't ever finish the poem. I couldn't think of a secret and the poem with the dialogues kept going back and forth and so on and then there was nothing I could think of even when I was scratching my head and so I stopped. That note-book/diary was there for a long time and the half-finished poem kept taunting me, teasing me and just plain annoying me. Why didn't he just tell me what it was and get on with things!

In Class VIII, A Slave's Dream joined the three other poems that I had in my mind although by that time O Captain had fallen from his pedestal....why did the captain have to die for heaven's sake and it had joined, for different reasons, the other poem (which a girl in class would recite with much passion and I had heard her recite it in Class V for the first time and she had also won the first prize in the recitation competition), "The boy stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled..." Fine, it's all about following orders but that seemed a little too extreme...although strangely enough "The Valley of Death" poem (The Charge of the Light Brigade) always, always brought the shivers, made me feel like I was in the middle of a battle zone where I had to keep going, and the poem has kept me hooked even after so many years. While reading George Orwell's collection titled "Unpleasant essays" some/many months ago, a liner in one of his hilarious essays brought back the poem to my head...

No more poems were learnt while in school although I think I remember learning Ulysses at some point and the memory of that line about the "arch" sort of shimmers in my head every now and again. In Classes IX and X we had Julius Caesar and I realised that all I needed to do was read through the Acts and the Scenes as though I were each of the characters. I'd do that twice through right before the exams and I could remember everything and although I did read the whole play (in fact that is the only whole unabridged Shakespeare play that I've read apart from The Merchant of Venice...it shames me to say this but it's better admitting to the truth. I keep thinking I'll read Hamlet and Macbeth at least and I have them now at home...but I never get around to reading them...) that double-reading before exams was what I enjoyed the most - funnily enough. I could never do the "enacting" at other times....I tried once but I sounded fake. One of the reasons I was sad that I couldn't go in for the Delhi Board for my +2 (instead of the West Bengal Board) was because I couldn't read/enact The Merchant of Venice the same way and I never have been. In Classes XI and XII there was Lucy - which always brought in two dominant double emotions (among others) of "ah-sigh" and "deep (minus expletive) annoyance"...and The Ancient Mariner, which haunted me and gave me the goosebumps and made me dream strange dreams for the longest time. I was in that man's skin...under his skin and some vaguely remembered liners haunt me still...and I'll never forget what an albatross means...it's not just any bird and it will never be just a bird for me. There was a bit from Paradise Lost as well but that is not something I very clearly remember partly because of yet another pronunciation gaffe I made with a friend over the phone while we were discussing the poem. It was to do with the word "Whilst"....I pronounced it as a soft "whistle" and her cackles of loud laughter and her explosions are all that I carry with me from that poem although I know for a fact that the some liners we had had had made an impression on my mind till that moment.

There were some Bengali poems and some songs that I learnt through the same point in time and some liners were learnt later....but about that - well let that be.

And then through the college years and through my Master's in India and for two years in between when I got myself stuck in my Bachelor's for longer than I thought I would - there was not a single poem I read or learnt or memorized. Absolutely none. Between 18 to almost 27, I read no poems...well actually, come to think of it, I'm reminded that I read a couple of Tagore's poems and then later on, close to 27 I did start reading poems - with new curiosity, however tentatively - but that's another story. Poems worry me - much like jokes - I always wonder worryingly whether I'll be able to understand them (and feel relieved and sometimes just rested when I do) but the thing that really saddens me is that even the few poems I like/understand (which can't be more than a handful) do not remain in memory.

In conclusion for this post: Some weeks ago while browsing the net, I chanced upon something that clicked. I have no idea about anything else or indeed who Fulke Greville is or what he was thinking - and I haven't looked at google at all for writing this post- but the poem liner makes sense...

I, with whose eyes her eyes committed theft.

Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (England 1554-1628)

All I know is that I understand it as I understand three of Dickinson's (and more than 9/10th of her poetry I do not understand) poems,

Much madness is the divinest sense

To a discerning eye;

Much sense is the starkest madness.

Or the other one, which the friend whose blogs appear on the right had as a quote in a piece on poetry that he had written, and had sent to me,

This world is not conclusion

A Spirit stands beyond

Invisible - as music - but positive - as sound...

To guess it puzzles scholars

To gain it men have borne

contempt of generations, and - crucifixion shown....

And the other one (- other bit actually fits in the middle of the previous one....pointless now to provide an explanation), which I love too, which appears in the post on music on the same friend's blog on the right:

It beckons and it baffles

philosophy - don't know

and through a riddle, at the end, sagacity must go...

while this other one, which once again, I came across for the first time in a piece (which read like a poem of sorts - sort of timeless inspite of the angst - which one could clearly and closely identify with) written by the, yes, same friend (well - what can I do?!) , makes no sense to me.

Love at first sight, some say,

Misnaming the helplessness of twinn'd souls

'gainst the huge tug of procreation!

I've pondered on this one, scratched my head, pondered some more, thought/imagined that I "got" it...and for more than 8 years now but I don't get anything about it. Maybe it's like an abstruse zen poem or something. It baffles.

Anyway, so much for this post. Night-time, night-cap, and cigarettes et al beckon.

Leigh Hunt's Poem and Time

I didn't know about this poem till last year, I think it was (or maybe the year before that?...), till the friend whose blogs appear on the right told me about it.

I started feeling rather jubilant about the poem after reading it the right way and I can't help let out a wry grin and a happy one as well (unless I'm staring away....) because I feel like both Jenny and Leigh Hunt...if that makes sense.

Jenny kiss'd me when we met,   

Jumping from the chair she sat in; 

Time, you thief, who love to get   

Sweets into your list, put that in! 

Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,   

Say that health and wealth have miss'd me, 

Say I'm growing old, but add,   

Jenny kiss'd me. 

The poem suddenly came back to me even though it's been wandering around in my head for a while. I think some memories do seem utterly priceless - within the space and the time of the now - even when one is staring away at the computer screen and thinking and worrying and blinking about writing what has to be written as work and hoping that it sounds as it's meant to even while knowing that it has to, and about the other...I found out today that Holi is around the corner...and here I was wondering whether the Bengali New Year was about to be coming around this month!

Spring Break is on the run and my sense of time has gotten somewhat messy. We have also sprung forward by an hour since Sunday but I obmutaciously refuse to set my clock straight. The only clock in the house which reads the right time is the computer clock!

Space: A Space

Spaces affect me in a peculiar way. Inhabiting a bit of closed space for too long and letting my mind travel in and out and back again makes me feel that that bit of space that I inhabit is not entirely real nor unreal and time honestly does become fuzzy. However this is not a rambling piece on space and time.

For almost a year I've been wanting to re-paint my bathroom. I know not whether it is kosher to talk about one's bathroom on a public blog but it is a western bathroom with a propah shower stall and all other regular amenities and my bathroom is a curious space where time and space and imagination and reality have collided on multiple occasions, and very often I sit (on the cool and sometimes warm tiled floor), think, talk within, read, drink drinks of various flavours and hues, smoke and listen to music. And so my bathroom has been a rather special space for me and I spend time there.

On Saturday while sitting there and looking at the questions to put in for an exam I was gripped by the intense need to paint it and I finally got around to painting it and all through the night. I had a big tub of white paint and some small jars of coloured paints. The tub of white paint had become leather-rubber - having spent the better part of last year in the cold storage room which houses odds and ends and the dryer. I waited for it to resemble paint but since it failed to become a miracle I set out to buy some white paint and I did (alongwith a quart of red paint). And then in the night there were three walls all painted and done and the ceiling as well, and in close to an hour. But then a single shelf, the door, and the archway (yes, my bathroom has an archway - a rectangular archway...) took almost four hours (I'm telling you - something funny happens with time in that space). I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the clock. But being adamant and stubborn sometimes has its benefits. No sleeping till the bathroom was painted and cleared of all junk that it has been housing because I've been storing it. As I looked at the archway I got out the new red quart of paint (which had a fancy name to it: Liquorice. The white tub simply said, "Frost"), and so the archway - parts of it were slapped and coated with a vivid red. Another coat of paint was applied to the walls and all, and a fair spray mists and streaks of paint I realised later had flew onto my head while doing the ceiling (which thank heavens was low enough for me to just about reach with the extended roller brush). That done the bathroom was scrubbed down clean and the junk removed. (A bit of fine-tuning with colour and space is what remains, which I will attend to in bits.) Later on in the morning I lit lots of small and medium candles and was feeling quite pleased...it now dazzles. That space. But there's still something funny that happens there. Something with space and time and God-knows-what-else...

Blossoms after separation

It's strange how Guha's car (passed on to him by his sister, which he signed over to me) has been steadily wasting away ever since he's gone over to Rockville. First (fu-h-st) it wouldn't start one day right outside Gerry's. I'd gone in to get my morning coffee before going over to teach. It simply wouldn't start. I turned the ignition key but a loud ponderous silence met my ears. I turned the key again and was met with the same. I wasn't in a mood to hear the weighty silent thoughts of Blossoms right then. Thankfully enough, I saw the trolley turning the corner and so I leapt out of Blossoms with my bag and key and coffee along with my packet of cigarettes and ran over to the bus-stop and flagged down the trolley. I called Gerry as soon as I was on the bus and let him know and he said, "I saw you. Good work there." I returned from the class and Kim (my neighbour) was there. He came out with me. Got into the car, turned the ignition key and Blossoms brrr-ed into action. I was puzzled and Kim gave me a look which seemed to say, "now what were you saying about the car not starting?"

After that I started taking the trolley in the mornings (and stopped doing that after a week or so and started walking to and fro). I still used Blossoms for groceries. That was nailed in the head when one day, Sean, another neighbour, informed me that one of the window's had been shattered. It was some sort of an accident, I guess. So one window went missing. I tried taking Blossoms out one evening (minus the shattered window) when the car door got stuck. It simply wouldn't close shut. The lock was tweaked and that was that. There was nothing I could do. I put the plastic sheet back in place and went off walking and bought a movie from Borders, My Cousin Vinny, had a nice cold sandwich by myself while grinning in glee and walked back home.

Now I'm not sure what state Blossoms is in. I've been worried that she'll be losing bits and parts of herself with every passing week. However, my very quiet nice neighbour and his nice wife (Senthil and Madhu) also wish to go grocery shopping today. Hopefully Blossoms will be in fine fettle today and not in her state of silent sepearation. Let's see.

P.S: I'm happy to report that Blossoms is doing perfectly fine. She happily "brr-ed" along yesterday. And did not give me the silent treatment nor does anything else seemed to have happened to her. She's behaving herself well in front of strangers and other friends.

Amazing Grace

Some days ago - a couple or maybe more I was marching down to Panera - a bakery chain, which lies across the river. I had my cloth bag and it's been a strange winter but it wasn't particularly cold but I had my (fairly new) white coat (which Guha nagged me to get and then simply bought) and a (fairly new) black hat on (which for those readers who may have come across the book series, made me look a little like Paddington Bear...at least I'm quite convinced that I looked like a "Detective Paddington Bear"). I was walking and marching along when all of a sudden a cycle whizzed by me on the side-walk and something I saw landed right on my right. I was somewhat vaguely startled out of my happy blob of a reverie to see that a grey-blue baseball cap was lying on the ground. I picked it up and there was a breathless little voice saying, "Oh, thank you, thank you." I turned around and I saw this bright, bright very young boy who was reaching out his hand for his cap. I handed it to him and said, "Jesus Christ I was terrified there for a second that you'd crashed somewhere." He gave me a brilliant smile with his eyes glistening, and I very beatifically blessed him. I don't know whether bear look-alikes are allowed to bless - but I went on ahead for my evening jaunt feeling quite serene.

That's that for the post today.

P.S: I went outside for a bit. The sun is here...the mushy ice is slowly melting...Spring is bouncing around in the air and The Cross on the Church (Immaculate Conception) steeple around the corner was all shining and just 'there'!....Hmm.

Hmmm...

Funny-funny: with all my memory for odd dates, which stick to me even when I apparently forget - I completely lost my sense of time - today is Valentine's Day. Should I say 'Yippee'?

Well I'll go ahead and say, "Happy Valentine's Day" and make wishes all the same. No harm in that.

Here's a song link and another one by The Beatles, which I've loved for a fairly long time - ever since we were in school...and some of us would get together and sing it quite lustily too, back in those days. A couple of young folks or more? might like it, me thinks (if they haven't heard 'em already, that is).

Riding on the Bus

I take the bus back and forth these days. Yesterday something pricelessly sweet happened. Normally I glint and glare and keep a dead-pan expression on my face although I do greet the bus-driver and he greets me with a cheery hello and so on. And as far as I have observed (and Guha when he was here is the one who got me communicating with bus-drivers although I can never be quite as garrulous as he used to be) - the greetings are genuine. One bus-driver indeed had remarked that it was always a pleasure to see Guha or me because we always smiled and said 'hello, how are you doing?' The young bus-driver who told me so was a young girl herself (younger than I am for sure) and she was so breathless when she told me the same and more - about how rude some of the passengers were - I would have tried giving her a warm hug if I could have.

Anyway, yesterday I was somewhat distracted while on the bus. Thinking about this and that although I had noticed that it was a "toddler day". So these very young children are taken to the public library some days of the week by, what I think, are basically rather elderly and somewhat portly old women. Who takes care of whom, is a good question. They're a lovely bunch - that's for sure but most of the times I simply glance and look away. Yesterday was no different at the beginning. I was lost in my thoughts and at some point the bus came to a halt in front of the public library. At some point jostled out of my thoughts I looked up to hear one of the elderly women trying to tell one of the little girls to keep walking. Now something needs to be said. The bus was completely empty apart from the three women, the brood of little children and me. And the bus has some stairs towards the back. When I looked up a strange sight greeted my eyes. There were these young children all standing like darling little lambs. Right at the front of this standing queue was a little girl dressed in pink pants and a pink jersey and she was just standing there, waiting. The rest of the kids were also just standing there. The elderly women were unable to move ahead of the kids. There was no space and no amount of coaxing the little girl had gotten her to budge and walk on through the length of the bus. I smiled in my head very broadly. It was like they were little children for sure....but like little lambs. I got up from my seat without thinking and smiling at the little girl in pink, I took her hand and said, "Come along. Come along. Keep walking and you'll see that the rest of them will be following you." And she let me take her little hand in mine and sure enough the entire brood of little kids started following the girl and me. The bus-driver was so grateful that I felt terribly embarrassed. I got off the bus and picked up the tiny tot and put her on the sidewalk and all the other kids followed (and no, I didn't pick up each kid and deposit her (they were all little girls yester') onto the sidewalk! That would have been most time-consuming and quite unnecessary. They were very, very young - maybe 4/5 but were all quite capable of getting off from a bus, thank you!). The sidewalk was a tad slippery and so I kept a watch on the kids. And of course the three women were gushing their kind thanks and I was smiling gently and feeling terribly embarrassed or a bit at any rate but saying, "Oh, it was my pleasure. Really." The bus-driver thanked me again and once before I got off the bus and I grinned cheerily and got off. Back to thinking furiously and reading and pondering on other matters but it was a lovely little incident that filled my heart for those moments for me....

I remember a friend telling me that I could write about life here but I didn't know what to write about....this seems to be something lovely enough...

That's the post for today.

On comments and reviews and accents?

This post would fit better on my other blog....but I've become reticent on that blog for different reasons and so I'll fit this here.

I've received a variety of comments and reviews on my ability and competence as an instructor. Some of the comments are funny and some are strange and some are just mean (she's a racist!) and some although seemingly mean I can recognize the facts in them (she writes on the board and I don't know what the arrows and arrows and more arrows mean...strangely enough the arrows and the writing have also made sense to some students; she gets flustered in class and talks about too many things and goes off on tangents).

However one comment is so funny and delightful - I have decided to share it. I laughed when I read it. I have got all sorts of comments about my accent: where do you come from? Where did you do your schooling? You have a different accent...I personally think I've got a mongrel accent. I can modulate it a bit when I'm careful and when I'm teaching but it lapses sometimes into a hotchpotch of an accent which it is anyway.

Anyway, one student: a very sweet young boy with a very disarming smile had written words to the effect of, ....has got a lovely accent. Her accent reminds me of Julie Andrews in "The Sound of Music" !!!! Very embarrassed I was indeed.

I could write a mile long post here but I'll get going for now.

The bird bunch and the cat

It's definitely the middle of winter here and a very strange winter it's been but there's something stranger....there have been six or seven black birds that have been flying onto my porch for the last couple of days. I have no idea why....did they imagine that Spring had arrived?

It's the same bunch of birds (I hope it's the same bunch) that's been visiting my porch for the last couple of days. There is a stray cat who lives on the porch (a cat - whom Guha christened 'Minimus' - who still assumes that I'm going to catch him and turn him into a winter muffler; he sometimes forgets and approaches my extended fingers but then runs away; I don't know whether both of us are a little scared of each other because sometimes I am a little worried that he's going to bite my fingers off....and sometimes he'll be engaging in some form of communication - with longing looks and all exchanged across the window - with my two cats who live inside; sometimes he miaows for them when they are elsewhere; and then sometimes he'll be miaowwing furiously even when he has his food and water and both Barty and Max are sitting near the window - I know he's being a "cat" then; I rush outside still - like the human fool I am - and then he'll go scampering under the couch and sit there very comfortably and look at me; so I'll be sitting on my haunches and he'll be sitting there looking immensely pleased with himself and honouring me with a kind look every now and again but he'll not come anywhere near me; so I'll be yakking for a bit while sitting on my haunches; he has no intentions of coming any closer but he sometimes has an almost smug look alongwith a sort of forlorn look - the little dear - which seems to say, "aha. I got you to come out and sit with me." He looks perfectly content and after a while I go back in). The first day I saw the bunch of birds swooping down I thought I was seeing things until Barty (my cat) started chittering and chattering the way cats do when they see birds. I looked and they went for the little stray cat's bowl of food...at least I think that's what they did after chattering amongst themselves. So out I went and put some more cat food into a plate. The plate of food was gone in the eve' - so I'm assuming the birds had their fill. They came down again just some moments ago. They look a little confused...as much as I can make out and somewhat ruffled too - going by their feathers. I don't know whether they are rattled but I believe they might be for one of the birds with its feathers sticking out suddenly pecked the other one whose feathers are also sticking out and the second one pecked the other one back for no reason that I could see; it all seemed quite unnecessary - and rather rude - although I don't know whether they were exchanging fond gestures....

But what are the birds doing here in the middle of winter? Guha, the vet, has let me know that I should give them some moong dal and rice - and so I've put both on a plate out on the porch.

Two Cats...

.....Spotty on the prowl when it was warmer and he was feeling better....

Many years ago when I was living in Calcutta at my parents' apartment I was running up the stairs when I spotted an abandoned cat and my breath went out. It was a kitten. Curled up and sleeping on the window-sill with the pale light from the sun streaming onto it. It was twitching its nostrils every once in a while and if anyone has seen a kitten sleeping they'll know what I mean when I say that this kitten was really curled up with its head tucked under a paw. It was this spotted little ball. Black and white. More white than black. I brought my fingers close to it. It didn't budge. I stroked it. And it grunted (not purred) a soft grunt. I went up the four steps, rushed inside the house. Went to the fridge, got some milk, warmed it a bit, got some bread and dunked it into the milk - put it all in a bowl and ran out again. The kitten was still there. And at some point he (I don't know whether it was a he - I think it was a he) woke up, blinked and looked a little dazed. It let out a yawn that made its head disappear. I placed the milk bowl in front of his face and put my finger into it, brought it near his mouth, and he licked my finger. He was a bright kitten for he soon lapped up his meal and looked at me with a mighty satisfied expression on his face. I couldn't take him home although I would have if I'd had a place of my own. Later on in the day or maybe the next, he came miawowing piteously over to the door. I petted him and he brushed along my leg. I gave him a bowl of milk and bread and he lapped it up. But that was the last bowl I ever did give him. I never saw him again.

The year before last - there was an abandoned cat. For the better part of the year the cat had been abandoned by a girl whom if I see again I will not waste my time exchanging pleasantries. The cat was black and white. More white than black and for most of the time he wandered around the terrace trimmings (as only cats can) and perched itself near the edge of the terrace, looking up and down and miaowwing. It would try getting into the apartment that had been his home before he was kicked out by the girl who had decided to move houses and leave him behind. For a good couple of months I didn't realise what was going on till Kim, our neighbour, pointed out that the Black-and white tabby had indeed been abandoned. We started keeping some food and water outisde and the white and black tabby was not unhappy with the food but was always more delighted with some attention. It was summer, I think, at that point. So he would lap up some milk too but the thing he loved best was being cuddled. He would settle on your lap and sit and try and sniff your face and roll over and sometimes he would just sit in companionable silence and we (Kim Guha, and I) wondered about and barked at the absent girl who could have abandoned the cat. I named him "Spotty" (I'm not very good with names and the uninspired name fairly stuck to the cat). Sometimes I'd watch him and he'd go prancing across the road (although he never quite really pranced - he seemed to be a rather dignified cat...but I guess dignified cats too have their moments); sometimes he'd very silently approach squirrels, and believe it or not he never did pounce on a squirrel but simply chased them up a tree. And sometimes he was cranky....loving but quite cranky and while he did give Guha a hefty nip one day - I got a hiss and a sharp bite on one occasion...but there was a reason. When one has a growing tumour, which eventually grows to the size of a golf ball by the time it's discovered, I don't think one is feeling particularly good inside and most likely does not want to be petted on its head...

He wasn't well and that came to light in Fall and especially through winter. He was fairly wasting away and was looking scraggly and wasn't always able to groom himself but we didn't know what was wrong with him back then. He would always come and sit on your lap and get petted and comforted and comforting the one who'd be comforting him, and by then there was no hissing nor biting although sometimes I swear he had a rather sad look in his eyes...(there's much I could write about that magnificent cat but only some of it can I write about here). He wouldn't come out of his make-shift house for the food. He would sit there looking at it. Yet if Guha or I went out, he'd leap out of his little house and settle on our laps. There were some days though that I felt like I couldn't go out and sit with him....I don't know how to put this in. It felt like a bloody wrench leaving him and coming back inside. And Spotty would so firmly be sitting there and sometimes he'd fall asleep on your lap...all curled up.

This and that transpired. He was treated by our very kind vet. One of my professor's gave him a home since Guha and I could not take him in (Oh, and I was mad about that but there's no point in being mad about some things....As Guha reasonably pointed out with two little/big cats of our own we couldn't bring in a cat with mood swings...). But just before Christmas Day, I knew. I was visiting Spotty (Spotster) at the vet regularly where he was kept for observation and when all the tests came back negative and my vet told me that I could take him with me...I was there looking and talking with Spotty, and I knew.

He did have a home for a week or so (the exact dates, I have now forgotten). My professor named him "Soccer-Ball" (much more appropriate...although he was all skin and bones mostly...). He slept in the warmth and found some lap to settle on or found someone in the house to cuddle up to. My professor had grown very fond of him too. And yet I knew. And sure enough three days after I went over to meet him one Friday, my professor sent an e-mail. Guha and I went over. We took Spotty over to the vet one last time. And our vet ran some final tests and for most of the time the brave cat sat on my lap somewhat disconsolate but unprotesting looking incredibly fragile - and with the smell of death hanging around him even as I held him close....and when the results came in we didn't flinch when our vet said that it would be better if Spotty were euthanized for he had bone cancer. Our vet did it of course. Told us exactly what would happen and Justin - one of the assistants who was there as well - comforted the little cat as well. I kept patting Spotty on the head and stroking him. Spotty put up a fight though. He didn't go down without letting out one nice loud miaow. I stroked him on the head, called out to God, and by then he was gone.

Guha wrapped him up after some minutes in one of my old grey sweatshirts, which I'd had for a long time...and he was cremated along with that old grey sweatshirt.

And so there went another black and white tabby. There are lots of memories I have of Spotty - but these will do for the nonce. I'm glad though...that I was there when I put him down. That's one thing I am glad about.

Two disconnected bits

The School newspaper, The Exponent, used to carry really bad cartoons but it's one of those things that I always read and groaned over whenever I read the paper. However, today's newspaper carried one by a new cartoonist. (When I read the paper I also read the astrology section and nod my head or shake my head or wonder or worry - not very seriously, but still. I can't help it: I was one of those Linda Goodman fans when we were growing up in school. I had also been a Cheiro fan and read lots of palms through my college days and university days [nobody threw gold coins my way though I did get some delighted "How did you know that?" to my delight as well back then...] and even now I can't help trying to look at people's palms if I can...so if there were a palmistry section - I would have read that as well).

To get back. Today's cartoon tickled my funny bone. The Cartoon Title is: Why We Can't Have Nice Things by Ellie Broughton

One college kid says: Oh, no. My horoscope says today is a bad day for me. I can't take two in a row.

The second kid, with a wry look, says: You've gotta stop procrastinating. That's yesterday's paper.

(*Very often I've looked at the previous day's paper and said the same thing. "Insipid day yesterday and today. Great. But wait. That sounds like what I read yesterday. Ohhhh......"*)

Completely disconnected tale (even my batty head can't come up with however remote a connection):

Two phone calls in a row today: one made to the shuttle service that runs between Chicago and Purdue and one received from the cell phone company for a bill payment.

I talk for five minutes on each call, with the respective woman in charge, and at the end of both calls I thank them and I'm thanked in turn with a very cheery, "Thank you Sir."

!