Song

I listen here only to all of those songs that C thought I'd never listen to. I listen repeatedly and spend my empty mornings, airy afternoons and leaden nights thinking of all I have betrayed in my pursuit of the unknown, my stubborn desire to push myself far far far, only to see how far I can go.

Thinking of all that I have betrayed. Cat babies, friend, friend, father, a new home, books collected over the years, over changing tastes, a volatile-adoring teacher-boss-friend, a university campus thought of so often in the rain, friend, ma, a ceramic tiled study table, the money plant strand in the mayonnaise bottle in the black bathroom, a half finished bottle of vodka, and the glasses from that night left unwashed by the sink, a promise to watch Bommarillu, a blue car broken down to a skeleton, yet one that purrs when I take the wheel, sitting in my pajamas every morning opening the newspaper last page first for all the cricket gossip...

I listen over and over. And over.

Na yeh chand hoga, na taare rahenge
Magar hum hamesha tumhaare rahenge

...wake me up
when September ends...

Hyderabad: August 6, 2006

…and on this, a most beautiful Sunday morning, the first of my last four Sundays here in this place, I walk barefoot on the grass, thinking of the night recently gone by, spent awake with her and her, giggling, crying, pulling secrets out of each other’s loosening fists. Stirring alive our lives in goblets of vodka, holding on to a thinning, fraying corner of the night, lest it pass. But it does. The sun rises, and here I am.

I think of them, of all those times I have hugged them, wishing them to be the happiest anyone has ever been. I think of how I have never been able to be the first to say “I’ll miss you”. I think of the evening of a friend’s engagement, sitting in a circle on a carpet on the floor, magically swiping out Bappi Lahiri numbers from behind each other’s ears. Of a heavy, wooden dining table with a spread dished out at my request, of a cook who worries occasionally about how I will survive by myself when I can’t put a meal together on my own. I actually can, when I have to, I want to tell him, but I let it go. There is comfort in this concern.

I think of a room in an apartment far, far away from my home, where the heavy drapes on the window cut out the most of the light. We could hear the rain, though, lying under this window. He liked the rain, he had said. I did too. I think of him, the boy who lied, as did I, so he could be there. The boy I may never again hold the same way.

Ma, and her ceaseless preoccupation with the dishes and the laundry. There was one moment, when she relaxed her guard, and noticed a fawn coloured horse running across the empty field behind our house. I think of that moment, which had held us both in thrall. And Balloo, vexed that I could not come to the garden to plant the parijat on my dead cat’s grave. But understanding, in the end. Understanding everything.

I think of an afternoon weeks ago, when I lay in this grass that I walk on right now, looking for animal shapes in the clouds and listening to Greenday sing “it’s something unpredictable, but in the end is right…I hope you had the time of your life.” And on this, a most beautiful Sunday morning, I think that all of them - this home, this time, these people, this age, this life – will be dearly missed.

In hindsight

Bah. What drama. It was all pretty much out there in the end, wasn't it?

Hanging in the air...

I tread like a cat on a still, summer afternoon, afraid I might awaken it from its slumber. You tiptoe around it on bare toes, looking at it through the corners of your eyes, and then looking away, until it ceases to exist anymore...

It hangs in the air, like a sentence half spoken. And we leave it that way, with our half spoken sentences. I think we both like the suspense...and the imagination that works in the absence of knowing. We could pluck it out of the air, either you or me, and pin it to the ground so we'd know what it is, but I suppose we are, yet, unwilling to give up the imagining of all that can be, in exchange for knowing all that cannot.

Doggerel

I am asked my favourite writers and works
I accept the self-indulgence; for there are no other perks
And contemplate on how best to pay tribute
To the pilgrimage to libraries, to bring home the loot
To revel in its brilliance, and smile at its quirks.

Rushdie, here, I will not mention
Seth though, will get an extension.
Repute evades his Two Lives ploy
But An Equal Music and A Suitable Boy
Pre-empt all possible bones of contention.

The Golden Gate carried me away
(My first encounter with verse was way
back when I was a mere seven years old
with the Beastly Tales crocodile – “Go away!”, he’d been told.)
“Talk to us, John”, he says – “we will all die someday.”

Hanif Kureishi is a new-found treasure,
Loved and loathed in equal measure.
For this I thank my dear friend’s love
With years of cajoling (and sometimes a shove)
I found not the bloodstream, but in it the pleasure.

Roy merits not a stanza but two
Dizygotic, though, and quite different too.
The first, for Rahel and Estha I write
With them I have lived; in them I delight
‘Naaley’, she says – a haunting, painful adieu.

The second – please see this from where I am –
- For damning the bomb and blasting the dam
For speaking, for seeking to question malpractice,
With words to do it Infinite Justice
For being human, yes – but the best she can.

And him – the Cinnamon Peeler, should I say?
Or simply (in reverence) Michael Ondaatje?
Of Colombo, of Toronto, of Anuradhapura
Of Count Almasy searching for the Zerzura
And the pain in the paintings on walls of clay.

Poetry is in his every word, they tell me
How he loves, and how much, compel me
He speaks of letters like the bones of a lover’s spine
Of scurrying in the ceiling, or a scar’s strange design
“I am the cinnamon peeler’s wife,” he writes, “Smell me.”

There is, then, the ancient Graham Greene
He took me to places where I have been
In the ageless nights and the dying mornings
of A Quiet American; or just the life dawning
on A Burnt Out Case; I have felt it all - I have seen.

Dancing in Cambodia I have been for a while
Saloth Sar’s life, and that of the king, beguile.
With The Imam and the Indian, Malaria in the Bay
And all the wonder of Mandalay
Amitav Ghosh is ahead of many by a mile.

And him, mailing manuscripts to Ezra Pound
Oh, what treasures in Wastelands I have found!
Thomas Stearns: A magician? Well, yet –
There is some magic in the verse of Eliot
With Prufrock on winter mornings, or Macavity gone underground!

Coming to the part where I must close this door
“Another line”, I think, or “Just a few more”
To Haroun I must acknowledge my debt
To those not mentioned – there will be verses yet
(Though Priestly might say “I Have Been Here Before”!)

Some works, of course, are bigger than their makers
Some I could mention, but they would find no takers.
In writing, I have suffered the reader’s curse
Not knowing how to end this tortuous verse
“A dozen stanzas”, I had thought – but make it a baker’s!

The Meanwhile.

Yes, of course. The ‘meanwhile’. It’s almost a place to me, this meanwhile, and I have been skirting around it, these last few days. It comes in my way everyday, with every thought I think. But I walk around it, instead of across. Not very deftly, though, for every once in a while a foot slips into this dreaded territory…like today, when I read something from another place that I haven’t been too for very long, this, though, quite unconsciously. My dear, dear friend is leaving the country, she says. Yes, indeed I am. But I am unprepared for this, unprepared to find this on her blog, and suddenly, it makes me shudder. I consider for a moment if I should just turn away, realising almost immediately after that it was foolish of me to think I could actually do so. So I read.

My dear, dear friend, she says. I smile, fighting the feeling in my throat, the tenseness in my face that I know will bring tears. How many times have we met in the last year? If I counted them on the divisions in my fingers, it probably wouldn’t take more than one hand. There are people with whom that would have mattered. But not with her. Our affection does not have to be nourished anymore by scant meetings and scattered phone conversations, deeply treasured as they are, for it now sustains itself. I tell her that there will be the ‘in-between’, when I will return, but even if that moment arrives only years later, we will still be able to do some things the old way. We will still hug with the same warmth, still gossip about some of the same people, still have some of the same concerns. But we would also have evolved, changed. We will be older, and perhaps different.

Everything will be, that is what this ‘meanwhile’ will do. And I am not entirely unafraid of it. That day at the bus station, when I was going away for just the weekend, I watched through the darkened glass near my window seat, the only man I have ever known as a father, the only man on the station that night, waiting until my bus pulled away, waving at the window he knew I was behind. He looked weary, and I knew it wasn’t the sixty years he had behind him, but the two days ahead. I have made a pact with him about visiting me every year (“We’ll go to the West Indies to watch the World Cup next year…it’s close…” “Not from where you’re going to live, it’ll be very far.” “Whatever, it’s closer than here, right?” Indisputable logic.), but there will still be a meanwhile. In which he will grow older. And perhaps lonely.

There is the other friend, too. I left a comment on her blog today, on a post where she speaks of making late night phone calls to her best friend, or opening a chat window on gmail, the way only we know how. I said that we live one kilometer apart, and gmail is what it takes. I wanted to add another line, about how it would be from a continent away, but I don’t because I do not know that myself. Some things will be the same with her too, for our affection need not be stoked anymore. The hugs, the gossip, the concerns will still be the same, some of them. Only older. With, perhaps, or perhaps not, I do not know, an uncertainty of all that happened in the meanwhile.

I have visions of the new University as well. Of long roads lined with trees on which the snow settles quietly, like dust. Of quaint little bookstores, outside which people in hats and old coats play aging violins. Of finding solitude tucked away in the heels of my shoes, finding calm nestled under a lamppost on a crowded, wet street. Finding a life, of sorts. But I still think of her, asking me what my state of mind is like. Telling me what fun it would be to study film. I run into her every now and then, almost serendipitously, and I increasingly believe that it is a small part of something much larger, higher. I think of him, retiring this October, in the new house with the cats, fretting, like he did this morning, about the wrong tree in the right corner of the garden. And I think of her, sitting at home right now (well, not really sitting, for she can’t) nursing a damaged tail bone. I think of her threatening me with the most dire consequences if I do not call her everyday. We were playing a game the other day, the two of us, where we both wrote out our wishlists for ten years from now. There were films there, and books, and travel, and love. Ten years from now, though, or even just after the meanwhile of months passes, and when I come back, perhaps all I would really want is a moment like that. Exactly the same. Or a moment like the one walking in the darkness in a parking lot, listening in delight to a poem from Matheran. Just one moment, just the same, perhaps even this one right now, where I force myself to write what I have been walking around for a while, knowing that my words, which fail me often these days, do no justice of any kind to it, knowing, that I can fight no longer the embarrassing tear that will, in a while, role down my face.

Nemiroff. Armenian. Flavoured magnificently with the two ripe red pimentoes swirling in it.

A twisted stalk of moneyplant swirls inside the bottle now, with one pimento, saved for Naveen, floating near the neck, yellow and limp. He never turned up to claim it, but like the bottles themselves, sometimes even the lees isn't meant to be discarded.

It is not even an office, actually. It is the front rooms of an aging house with old electric switches and graying wooden doors, scarred from where the weather has bitten them. I sit at a large table in another room, alone, with a brand new computer in front of me, folding my legs in every position possible to be able to rest the keyboard on it, for it is rather uncomfortable kept on the table. (It is on the table now, and as I arch forward, my back creeks.) Every now and then, I also keep wiping my hands, obsessively, on my unwashed, greasy jeans, trying to rid them of the dust that I cannot see, but I know is there. (For one morbid moment, I think of Lady Macbeth, and then of how I have always wanted to play her on stage.) But there will be dust. We make books here, and books make dust.

I cannot work, so I stare at the book in front of me. My Friend, My Enemy, Ismat Chugtai, translated from the Urdu by Tahira Naqvi. I have been carrying it around for a while now, a library due date stamped on an inside page, disrespectfully tilted. Why do I not read it? Because I am afraid of discovering all that I lose out on because I do not read Urdu, because I’m afraid a very big part of the little that my schooling has given me is English. And I am afraid of losing meaning to English. Even words get tight lipped and trussed in bow ties and bowler hats when English. Unsentimental. Too polished, too practiced. Just not raw enough…too phobic to be able to tell the story of two women under a quilt…The Quilt, it is called. Not Lihaaf, but The Quilt. I wonder what they would have called Chauthi ka Jaura. I think they let it be because ‘Dress for the Fourth Night’ might not have sounded very nice. Thank God. Or whomever.

Chauthi ka Juara. I think of the screenplay I wrote for this (yes, for the English version). It must still be lying somewhere in the house, draft after tattered draft, and the final typed out copy. He had liked it very much, CVS Sarma, he had said I must make it into a film. (“In Urdu”, I had argued across the table, sitting in his badly lit ‘staff room’.)

He died in February this year. I had gone to the funeral, and watched as they forced his son to go through the drills of a million brahminical rituals, destroying in death every single belief, or disbelief, that he had stood for in life. I think of him often…of that day when we were all sitting in the studio, and I had declared with authority to the rest of the class that saathi haath bataana was from Mother India. Of course they believed me. Until quietly, from the back of the room, CVS smiled at me and said, “It’s from Naya Daur” Yes, I do think of him often. Excuse the cliché, for it is true.

But the office: yes, to work, now.

At an anti Bush protest rally today: women, lots of women, and some children too.

“Eighth standard Vidyaranya students”, Padmini says with a half uncertain half hopeful smile. Bright smile.
“Ten years down the line, they’d all be serving in the American administration.” Buchamma, irony, pride, a certain grunt, even though it couldn’t be heard.
“I found it a little weird, though”, says Padmini, “when K was clicking pictures of her daughter holding a placard with the anti Bush slogan.”
(Me, I’m thinking, Pictures? Right. Bete, tumhara photo kal newspaper me bhi chhaapenge.)

Anyway, to this K. Apparently an organization run by her published a book on the Great Women of Telangana. The penultimate woman listed in that is her mother, and the last, of course, is K herself. So there they were, The Great Women of Telangana, along with a handful of slightly lesser mortals, saying, as they should, really, that Bush has no business coming here. And, of course, clicking pictures for the daughter, to put up on the walls of her room when she will be, as Buchamma says, “serving in the American administration”. Hopefully for her, the Democrats would have pulled a miracle by then.

Anyway, no more digressing. Back to the issue at hand. (Ha! Sometimes I just love these pedantic tropes!)

Some of the women were brought there, in cabs hired specially for this purpose. The others, a lot of them, were leading dual lives, the sort we all talk about here, the sort that we all, perhaps, live. The question, then:

Padmini’s coming back home in an auto. Curious, she asked the autowalah if he went for the anti Bush rally. His reply? I don’t have it verbatim, but I gather it was to this effect:
Kaun kaun aata, kaun kaun jaata, hame nahi maloom, hame to roz apna kaam karke paisa kamaana hai, na?

Hmm. I think. So true.

To phir ab karein kya is duniya ka??

Bird Flu.

of course it will. what's it got wings for?