An old un

The following was written in January right after classes had begun for the semester. An old, rambling post but I don't have anything new for now.

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The classes are at 7.30 in the mornings (but not every day of the week...I'm too embarrassed to admit to anything else). I couldn't remember the last time that I had to be ready and out of the house by 7 in the morning. I tried recollecting this bit of information during the brief Christmas break that we had (they call it 'winter' break here) but my memory eludes me. I do remember the last time that I was waking up and getting ready and out of my dorm room by 6.45. It was a term when I was doing three or four things, and doing them fairly well - so I thought. Even if I wasn't doing them well - I was delighted about the prospect of waking up early in the mornings even on the days that I wasn't so sure where I was going.

I told myself to get into a strict routine over Christmas. That didn't happen. And as it sometimes happens when certain things simply have to get done, after a couple of nights of dreaming strange dreams - the day I had to make an appearance - I shot out of bed as soon as the alarm went off. I fed my two little pets, got ready like an army sergeant, and was out of the house at a reasonably early time. The snow had been falling gently and steadily through the night and through the dense, black liquid light there were the silver white sparkles that I love. And there was the silence. The snow hadn't been plowed as yet. I brushed off the car (there's no trolley that early, and I'd much rather go and sleep in the classroom the previous night than try and walk all the way in the morning), hopped in, worked the windshield wipers, and one of them (the one on the driver's side, no less) fell off. Rumpelstiltskin, blue blistering barnacles and all that! I hopped out again, warmed my hands on my jacket, looked at the wiper, looked at the one that was fixed, and then set the loose one in. Out it fell. Okay, nice. Really nice. I could still make it if I walked and I looked out into the darkness wondering whether I should boot it up the hill or simply run at a steady enough pace all the way.

I stuffed the wiper in my pocket, dusted the snow off the windshield, hopped back into the car, peered through one clear spot, drove along and halted in front of Jerry's coffee shop and requested my neighbour to come out and have a look. He did what I did with the wiper, and it stayed on, and Kim said, "Don't use it too often." I nodded and off it was.

None of the roads seemed to have been plowed quite that early and as I inched along I couldn't stop staring at the snow and gingerly pressing on the wiper button. I would turn the knob once and the wiper, with a mind of its own, would provide me with two or even three furious, speedy flicks and come to a rest. At one point I even barked at it, "Give it a rest would you? I clicked just once." To prove a point, the rakish wiper gave another half-flick, and I said, "I didn't even touch the knob!"

It's just about 2 miles to the campus from where I live and I knew I simply needed to cross the bridge over the river without going off course or banging into a car or something else. And so I cruised along with the maniacal wiper half-fixed on, and at a somewhat jaunty angle, giving rapid and smart flicks when I wanted only one. I just prayed that it stayed on because it was doing its job perfectly well when it was doing it.

A friend had very kindly offered her empty parking spot behind her apartment complex. Given the strange winter we've been having here - I'd gone over to check the spot the earlier evening. It seemed a regular spot and there seemed to be a narrow, unpaved lane which sort of meandered its way between two apartment complexes and came to meet the large parking space. I'd checked all that the evening before. Now as I finally crossed the bridge without incident I slowed down as I approached the narrow lane, and I didn't know what it was actually. I was quite sure that it was the same lane I'd seen the evening before but it looked completely different. Snow was piled high. There was no lane that I could see. It looked like a lovely snowy mound. A hill of snow...a desolate space leading to other-lands - maybe. But not a lane. I wasn't going to risk trying to get through that and have the car getting stuck with one of the maniacal wipers flying off and hitting someone on the face...I had though inched off the road to take the turn and I could see a steady progression of traffic right behind me coming off from the bridge. I stayed put. Let all the cars and morning trucks pass me by and I got back to the main road while sipping some coffee hastily. Now to find a parking spot. I refused to touch the wiper button, and the wiper sensing the urgency of the situation ("the nut, who's been talking with me, has to reach her class on time") behaved itself for a bit. It wiped when it was so bidden and held its peace otherwise. I hunted around for barely two minutes and then the wonderful sight of an empty parking spot met my eyes. No parallel parking required. No crossing of mounds. No parking metre. I could technically park for an hour but if the little van with the roving eyes belonging to the sharp human didn't come by right away - I'd probably miss the ticket as well. At least I was hoping I would because the class itself was over an hour....

I stopped at the parking spot and the wiper gave me two of its brightest and sharpest flicks. "Go ahead. We're not on the bridge now," I cheerily yelled. I leapt out and there was the walk from there to the department. Quiet, silent, sparkling bits of snow through that still liquid black met me, and the air wasn't even cold enough for gloves. I gulped and raised my eyebrows and gave a half-smile.

The class was...fun but this is not about the class.

I raced back to the car after the class and the office hours were done for the day, and there was no parking ticket on the car. I emitted my silent thank-you. I needed to move the car though and needed to go and get some paperwork done. So it was back in. I jabbed at the wiper a couple of times and it seemed to be doing not too badly. But it was hairy driving around campus. I never did quite realise before today how many students simply jump out onto the road without looking or keep walking across the roads as if they are in a trance (even though I know I've done it myself sometimes* missed the bus twice and a lorry once: but it wasn't my fault with the lorry; the truck climbed onto the curb - hardly my fault....). But today it seemed as though it were happening more often. At some point I wondered whether the car was invisible. I know it doesn't help with the snow sometimes blowing towards one and when one is trying to keep one's eyes shut while still walking around but I wish the pedestrians would look up sometimes when they're crossing the middle of the road. While I was having these righteous thoughts, one red truck nearly banged into me while taking a speedy turn and I forgot to yell or honk the horn. I just gave the driver a glare which he couldn't see anyway. The rakish wiper was working well though till I got to yet another car park when suddenly it went flying off and landed somewhere in the snow. No students around, thankfully enough. I stopped the car, ran over to it where it was lying in the snow laughing. Anyway, I managed to fix it on again, and then it was back home while telling the wiper to go slow. I reached my street and let out a sigh of relief. I would not have wanted to be driving out on the highway today - that's for sure.

And I've been talking to a wiper...I think the nutty wiper is also missing a nut of its own.

Weird weather and winds

The weather here changed at some point when I wasn't paying attention. I was helping a friend for three days to move houses...not out of overflowing kindness of the heart but simply because there was nobody else. And sometime over the weekend the weather changed, and I noticed it yesterday noon or so for real. There's an undefinable breeze and sometimes a gust of wind, and it has a curious fragrance. It's not a fragrance of flowers or leaves. It's hard to say what it contains but it seems to be blowing in from other worlds and places and times. I can't even quite sense whether it's a warm or a cold wind. I mean that. I can't figure out whether even the air is warm or cool to the skin. My senses don't seem to know. There's sun. That much I can sense. And there's a sky shot through with a lazy blue. That much I can see. I know at other times a dancing, smiling if somewhat restless joy captivates me when similar weather saunters in. Now I just feel restive with nowhere to go, and those flickering, vague images make me want to run away somewhere for a bit. Yesterday after feeling the same urge to run off, to get out, to go do something - I finally left my computer and word documents alone, and got out of the house in the early evening, and wondered where I could go. I looked at the road. I simply went for a walk like every evening - just a more long-winded walk. That's all I did. A walk which lasted for two hours, and which took me to the river after a month. The river is in retreat and the sandy banks have green shoots and clumps of greenery. I walked around there. Sat for a bit. Smoked, of course. Went through a little pool of water with my feet sinking into the bottom making muddy whorls. The weather is distracting. Even now I can sense it while sitting indoors. It makes me go out but there's something missing so I come back in. I remember similar weather with strange winds even in Calcutta and in Durgapur. I don't even quite know whether there really was a wind or what those similar fragrances were. There used to be a missing, and I was quite sure that I was missing not being here, and that someday I'd be traveling a lot and that would take care of the feeling...maybe it's a feeling of wanderlust or of missing pasts long past or of seeing dead dreams playing out for real somewhere or of sensing imagined futures or maybe the weather is an accident: it comes in from parallel universes or something. Whatever it is it is entering my senses no matter how hard I try to avoid it. I can't think of a thing that I can do that would dispel the strangeness of the weather cutting into my senses. There's an emptiness, which shouldn't be empty. I feel like a dislocated self for every possibility, which sounds like a fine possibility is considered until I shake my head: go and sit in the library and work; work in the coffee-shop; take some print-outs and sit at a coffee-shop and read; walk around; go to a park maybe; watch a funny movie; go for a swim; go and sing on the hills (just kidding with this one)...so I stay indoors and do what I'm doing. Even fimh seems quiet, vague, and distracted, and lets me be. So there's nowhere within to crack jokes or smile or just be and let the strangeness linger while carrying on with things. Quite odd. I wonder whether this is like some other things, where one simply has to wait for the fever to pass.

I hate using my completely forgotten bits of french but there were a couple of phrases that I remember hearing, and which have since stuck. The weather now brings to mind one of them: that sense of je ne sais quoi...that's what seems to be skipping around within. Maybe I've just been here for too long a time and that's all there is to it. I don't know.

Lost Horizon....

I finished reading a rather strange book some days ago. One of the strangest things about the book is that it is written by the same author who wrote the very real and not remotely surreal story about love in a warm, wistful, amusing, and rather lump-swallowing worthy, and matter-of-fact way - Goodbye Mr. Chips. I'll never quite forget Mr. Chips teaching Latin while shrapnel and shells are exploding and the guns are firing, and he's there gently urging his boys to concentrate while cracking jokes - 'you cannot judge the importance of things by the noise they make', before going on to remark about the importance of being employed with something appropriate if fate so decides that 'we are interrupted': the teacher who came to be regarded as a philosopher and prophet, and much in demand for his knowledge as much as for his witty one liners. It was a deep love story too, but one which ended too soon. It sort of makes my mind switch too many gears to think that it's the same author who wrote the book I just about read....but then again there are some writers who do jump worlds and with impunity, which always makes me wonder and blink some or stare or both.

The book is about Shangri-La and about one man, Hugh Conway. That magical place suspended somewhere between Tibet and India, and a man who went through the war as a young boy and worked not too rigorously nor too energetically but did just enough while working at the consulate later on. An unusual character once again but one whom I couldn't understand too well (although I harboured his head every now and again in different ways, and in an amusing way sometimes but maybe not too well). He too seemed suspended in that abnormally real and half elusive space of Shangri-La or to use two expressions - he seemed incredibly ordinary and incredibly extraordinary. I didn't know whether he was sane or not, whether he was passionate or not, whether he cared deeply or not, whether he did right or not, and he didn't share his thoughts too often and sometimes not at all - so it was difficult to guess. He seemed to be utterly unruffled on the surface and dispassionate and yet there was something underneath....quite what it was I couldn't quite get.

I didn't understand his reasons for doing what he did too well either. Indeed why he did what he did or why he even liked the young idiotic, annoying, simpering, pompous boy who was very seriously lacking any bit of substantial or likeable matter in the space between his ears. - I don't understand at all. It wasn't just the young boy. It was also about the young (ancient) Manchu girl as well who had eyes only for that young nitwit of a boy (she didn't have eyes obviously even though she could physically see quite well), and Conway did what he had to because as he said, right after he wandered around in a daze not being able to share a word of what he had heard and knew and about his own role in the world that was to come, in the whole wide world it was that stupid boy and the young (ancient) Manchu girl whom he cared for, and he didn't quite know how to explain it himself, it seemed! 'Course he had fallen for the Manchu girl. He probably even knew exactly what was going to happen but did what he did anyway. Not that his role had he stayed put didn't make me feel isolated, strange, unusual and in some ways it gave me the chills too. Now when it flutters by there is a strange lonely silence that fills me. In some ways Conway's possible role reminds me of Leto's role that he chose for himself....and regretted deeply, for the first time, in God Emperor of Dune...but that was bound to happen...didn't feel any better when it did though.

Very real in some ways and surreal in other ways and different. But unreal? That I don't know about. It felt quite real in that space and it didn't feel unusual. It was about different worlds, normal and perfectly regular ones and not-so-regular ones colliding and merging for a bit within the life of a man. I could almost perfectly sense Conway's sense of reality while talking with the ancient, ancient lama and feeling at ease in his presence, and a sublime feeling of tranquility while watching the young (ancient) Manchu girl playing on her harpischord...and then conversing quite normally with the other three characters all marooned in the monastery. None of it seemed to be particularly jarring to him until that one meeting with the lama....quite why it shook him up the way it did, I do not know. Because he had been expecting that as well. I didn't and couldn't figure out what Conway was going through when that bleating boy started bleating his head off when after Conway finishes conversing with the lama and paces around in a daze, the boy jumps on him. I just felt incredibly lonely and wished that Conway had one human being in that blasted place with whom he could talk.

Gives me an odd feeling: the book when it flutters around in my head. An eerie feeling too and a lonely one. White silence. But maybe that's not unusual given the vivid and beautiful descriptions of the place (I wish I remembered one off the top of my head). I wonder whether he went back to that world of Shangri-La or what he did. James Hilton doesn't quite say....

The book is Lost Horizon. I still can't quite believe that the same writer wrote Goodbye Mr. Chips. That really does seem to be the unreal part. Of course...if writers can't imagine what good are they?!....

Reading Three Comrades

The utter senselessness and insensibility, insanity, incongruity, gruesomeness and despicability of war sounds in the background. It’s about the young men who serve and return from war, of friendship, of the ties that bind comrades-in-arms, of humanity, of remaining humane in the midst of a grey world, of struggling and battling and not giving in, of finding room for laughs with a car put together (a car named ‘Karl the Road Spook’), of a birthday and listing of years, of not really hoping, of having a friend and two who would not give a thought about laying down their lives and everything they could for the other, of finding sudden hope in the midst of that not-hoping, of finding life, of being touched by an inexplicable love, of touching a human life and of being touched by another human being through curious tentative beginnings, of a sudden ray of light, of a friend who drops everything to come racing down through the mist and rain with a doc', of wanting to take care of another, of taking care of another, of being made to feel alright, of make believing that things are perfect, of playing silly games while walking down a road lined with shops, of not having enough money, of the wrong kind of people who have lots, of listening to music on a radio and identifying music with the first bars, of wondering in an odd moment that one might have been a music teacher in another world, of telling stories to make the other laugh and being egged on by the other’s laughter even as life is dripping out drop by drop…, of falling in love slowly and deeply and fully, of the bliss of being, of utter despair, of a sudden cheeky hope that one might be going too, of a light gone out.

It wasn’t a book where I bonded with the characters – I became one of them, and felt through and lived through one of them and identified with the primary character and his thoughts most of all (and sometimes with the other primary character). Maybe it’s because it's written in the first person, maybe because one lives then and for those moments through the ‘I’ of the primary character – there is no hope nor help for it. But not all books written in the 'I' do that. Not all stories do that. Here I did and this book did.

I can’t know what it means to return from war nor what it means to struggle against the greyness that greets one on one’s return. These I could see only through the primary character and the others and feel only in a ghostly and nightmarish way (as a writer very matter-of-factly once said, maybe we carry imprints of cultural memories in us...). I do not know what it is like to have a friend especially like Koster and I never will, and I will never be able to be a friend like Koster either. And yet many of the thoughts and feelings I could feel viscerally - the return of life, the coming back to life - just as I could intensely feel the hope, the loss of hope, the playing of juvenile games to preserve hope even while hope trickles through one’s fingers. It’s a matter of playing against time, of making deals, of saying that something has to last, something has to stay...but really, what must and why? The feeling of gentle revulsion and the feeling of indifference towards the flat greyness of the world, and then the hard, implacable and frightful intensity with which one suddenly compares and sees everything in the light of what one has found – something incomparable, and then knowing – as a reader not as the character that something is amiss, the slow and accumulating dread of knowing and distancing oneself from the character then and then from the book, even before the hope barely hints at slipping away but to have the character calling out for some reason to get back into his world and to have him drape one, and to let out even little laughs because of the warm and funny and perfect conversations, the tiny incidents, the tenderness, the camaraderie, and also because the thoughts of the character and his little quirks and his sudden sentiments and the slow ones and some of his actions are like taking involuntary glimpses in the mirror, and all the other characters have grown on one too, and so one starts reading again, lets go, and starts all over again and knows that one simply has to read all the way through (with a quiet fimh in the background), and so one does while pausing to catch one’s breath, forgets to breathe and remembers only on taking in a sudden breath still walking through that haunting grey nothingness which is pierced with the laughter of the soul which holds so much promise that it doesn’t feel very real until, before one knows it, one has reached the final lap and has started hoping without intending to even while knowing that the long drawn-out ending up in the mountains can end only one way. There is that utter and final loss that hits one from within one even as one intently focuses on simply reading the last two or three pages and then the lines, even while one clenches one’s jaws, even while one wills one’s inner self not to cry out. And there is no getting over that loss. There is no getting over and getting on with things. I don’t know what he did after that. After sitting there. In that room. What did he do? I don’t know what Robby did. I was hoping he would die. That would have made it less unbearable. But what would Koster do and what would he do if and when Robby went back?

And those fine lines. The lines expressing a thought, a sentiment or a feeling that one knows one has felt and feels but has never been able to articulate nor express nor found the words. Very simply put. Without fuss and without going into a three page long passionate explanation. Remarque does that. Just a line. Or two. Finished off with maybe a smile. An emotion, a sentiment trapped in words and then one realizes all over again – even though one had almost started doubting the sanctity of language because of one’s own inadequacies of expression and utter hopelessness of ever getting anything to sound right especially in the midst of an argument or in the middle of writing – the beauty and the grace of language, of perfect words one following the other, of fine writing. For that’s what it is. Somebody has expressed in language the inexpressible thought that one could spend a lifetime fumbling around with or trying to explain and justify and defend (or feel too embarrassed or ashamed to even want to express in words). Maybe those trapped lines don’t mean that one is right. Maybe they don’t always mean that one is normal or particularly mature in feeling what one does…but one does know that someone (worthwhile) somewhere has felt the same and that somehow makes it better. There is an unbreakable connection and a bond and also a deep gratitude. (I have felt that, yes, but sometimes I start wondering whether some rare writers forget what they write or pretend to forget ...!). I could type out some of the liners from this book that gripped me but I won’t. That would be like sharing one’s diary of thoughts on public space.

I tried reading this book the first time while in Class XI or XII although I don’t remember from whom I’d borrowed the book. I’d read maybe twenty pages but I couldn’t go on. And for the last five years or so, I have tried reading it, at least, once a year (or Robby or maybe even Pat would call out from the book or God-only-knows who...)but I couldn't. I’d barely manage to get through the first 30 or so (yet again) and I’d feel the ghostly wrench. Nothing had gone wrong. There was hope, wasn’t there? But the chains would pull. There was something that was going to happen. Not just death. Something worse.

I got my current copy of the book from a library sale some 5 years ago. And I got it for 50 cents. This one, for some reason, is less widely available than All Quiet…, Spark of Life, The Road Back and Shadows in Paradise. The edition was brought out in 1958. It has a racy cover on the front (and Robby looks like a block and somewhat dimwitted and dull and somewhat cross-eyed and Pat looks like a shapely tart beckoning from an open window!) and a less racy one on the back. It looks like a cover for a cheap romance paperback, and it amused me in a dry way when it didn’t annoy me that the NYT book review blurb on the back said, ‘racy action and incident…’ and more. And it makes me laugh shortly when I see a comparison made between this and The Three Musketeers. Hmm (is it the 'three'?). Apparently this book '..is as racily written...'. Hmm. Makes me think that some things were the same back in the late 50's as far as selling books were concerned. And so no, the little blurb which talked about 'heartbreaking tragedy' had nothing to do with my own ghostly feelings. The print is fine and small and the pages are brown and of the sort that will not tear if not handled with care. The pages will break like a communion wafer. And inspite of all the gentleness with which I handled the book and while the book was held delicately by its binding when I bought it…upon one of my yearly attempts, the fragile book-binding – to my utter dismay – came apart. Down somewhere in the middle. And so I carried around both parts while reading it through this time. And as if that were not enough I made the mistake of carrying both parts in my bag just one day and a page came off and did break into two.

The book hits one in waves. I know I will forget most of it. But some of it will stay like very, very, very few books and writings and essays and stories have stayed within – even from the ones that I enjoyed reading when I did and have read more than once. There is something that gets absorbed from the book and gets absorbed within one’s being so that one will never forget an essence and some of the shards. They get implanted into one's being. And for now they and parts that I will forget later keep me company and gently rain or burst within while I go about doing normal and regular things that real humans do like walking (with fimh which might not be that normal).

Did I enjoy reading the book? I wouldn’t say that. I couldn’t say that. But one cannot not read it. I don’t know what may have happened if they had been together: would things have worked alright? Would they have been their quirky, not entirely comprehensible but strangely lovable selves who would have loved and lasted together? I don’t know these things (and there's little point in presenting the overheard arguments amongst the cynic, the mystic and the romantic in my head). Nor does the book tell me anything more about human responses to other humans. I’m just as utterly puzzled and sometimes laughingly or quietly puzzled as ever. People love and people like and people fall madly or slowly in love with and stay in love or fall more in love through time with those whom they do…and when they don’t – they don’t. And sometimes it all happens inspite of the reluctance and the accumulated cynicism (or marked scepticism) and wariness. There seems to be nothing terribly reasonable or explainable about the process. Why one and not another? Why those but not these others? Why that one and not this one? Who knows. And can one list off reasons? As Pat says at a point, 'If I knew all the reasons then it wouldn't be love'. Maybe that is so (still can't avoid prodding at it though). Maybe how humans love in the external world and whether they continue to love is a place where they have a choice...and human beings do love in different ways - that much (or little) I know. I don't quite know whether the book, for me, spells an absolute and horrifying loss of hope or whether it tells me that inspite of the horror and the loss there always is something that can be hoped for as long as people are living and alive and on the planet which makes its yearly swing around the sun or maybe both and some other stuff in between and besides. I know I’ll wonder ever so often, what did Robby do…?...and I'm not so sure I want to know.

...A dream lies dead here. May you softly go/Before this place, and turn away your eyes,/Nor seek to know the look of that which dies/Importuning Life for life. Walk not in woe,/But, for a little, let your step be slow....Dorothy Parker (from A dream lies dead)

A quiet 'Thank you...' to the characters from the books and other unnamed beings (human and otherwise) for egging me on to read the book.

Reminds me that I need to go back to the first 30 pages at some point....I didn't read them this time 'round. 'Night. - 28th June - 9th July.

P.S: This editing tool is driving me mad. It does whatever it wants to do with the formatting and then nothing looks right. I nearly deleted this post too!

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.