Open windows

Open windows, as a companion, have been with me for the better part of the last four years of my life. I have always treated a good window with respect. And be it, in selection of room in college, or placing my bed in my flat, windows have called the shots, for often than not.

Now, even if I don’t think of windows in a philosophical way (which, truth be told, I do!), it has quite a few practical disadvantages. In winter, say for example, it is a nuisance. The chilly draught that seeps in through the hinges, and the mosquitoes and other insects in winter: the dangers are real! In summer it is the afternoon sun which heats up the room by the day. By the night, in certain seasons, lizards from the outside wall ply up to find morsels for its dinner. Spiders as well. Not a very happy proposition being asleep and insects crawling all over you.

My story of windows can’t be said if I don’t say my story of clocks. I don’t have any clock in my bedroom. I don’t like to watch time crawl back and forth, in decisions and indecisions, in springs and bearings, in metals and ticks, into oblivion. The wall-clock is too crude, I always thought. But never said: too pompous to make such a statement, isn’t it?

The absence of a clock means the inclusion of an open window. What the clock can do the window cannot. The window cannot count seconds for its gusts, not minutes for breeze. The window looks on as the world moves, in complete disdain for the passage of time, which man fights against. And the sky-scraper-(or pine trees,-)sheared, tattered blue sky to float into your 8 by 10 of a room, under the wine of the moon. Cheers!

Keats, at last!

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness, -
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth.
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain -
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: -do I wake or sleep?

Iron Maiden, Hyatt and the apple.

A monk saw a turtle in the garden of Daizui’s monastery and asked the teacher, “All beings cover their bones with flesh and skin. Why does this being cover its flesh and skin with bones?” Master Daizui took off one of his sandals and covered the turtle with it.

Catharsis

I wonder what will I do if someone asks me why the hell should I know what you think or what you do? That certain anonymous someone is, in a way prodding at the very purpose of having a personal blog (as opposed to a technical, travel or gossip blog). Honestly, offhand I don’t have an answer. I write because I have to, and you read because you do. Period.

But then, as the proverbial devil takes over me in my infinite idle hours, the rumination begins. Why do I have to sweat in a traffic jam while some thousand postmen stage a protest march in Dalhouse Sqaure, venting their collective anger at having to march down the streets in summer heat or just to catch up on old mates they hadn’t met since years ago at the employment exchange: I would never know Protest against what, how long, and why: I have no clue about. My role, since I have landed up in Dalhouse Square at that juncture of time, is to stoically bear it. The catharsis of strangers.

I remember during the seasonal elections they used to paint the houses next to mine, as well as, of course, mine, with fluorescent shades of hammer and sickle or the omnipotent hand or the something else or the other. They painted them right over our wickets which we had demarcated with red chalk or pastels. Cricket was banned in those days; they said the kids might ‘deface their walls’. Well had to wait patiently, till the elections got over. Why I never knew? I didn’t vote then, cricket was what I wanted to do. But being born in that street and growing up during that time, I had to switch over to TV or videogames, or flying kites. Again the collective catharsis of the democracy was borne with a smile.

It took me a while to realize that catharsis is a fundamental right of people like (and maybe unlike) us. From purgation by the railway tracks, blaring mikes in the highway, mouthing profanities in claustrophobic local trains, banging keyboards in frustration, and the endurance thereof, is the victory lap of mutual coexistence.

And in this spirit of mutual coexistence, my dear reader, I urge to bear with my catharsis, since you lave chanced upon this hawker in the footpath of cyberspace. For remember, we are brothers in our goal, the common goal of easeful whiling away of time.

Cafe Mondegar

The streets of Colaba are no ordinary roads, they speak of an India beyond, which is riddled with snakes, charmed by monkeys and elephants, and bewitched by fakirs and maharajas. The hawkers here don’t sell chappals and handkerchiefs, no. No vegetables or track pants and T-shirts, no, not here! Here, instead, they suffuse the pavements with exotic perfumes and indigenous drums beat. On the streets you will find copper compasses and ivory tortoises, silver walking sticks and bedizened fumes of spices and incense sticks. And beads, old telephones with hand sets as heavy as dumbbells, horns picked up from rickshaws and lined neatly on the railing of the footpath, scissors, daggers, necklace, maps (outrageously outdated!), clocks, chimes and smoking pipes, sadhus with their own cornucopia of herbs, and swarms of firangs lining up to these hawker to buy little odds and ends at exorbitant rates for their antique value. The high streets with neon lights, booming with the biggest banners, look somberly at spectacle. And in the middle of this pandemonium, stands Café Mondegar.

Café Mondegar is crowded beyond the norms of any normal café. Café Mondegar serves you wines and beer, steaks and chips, fries and prawns, poatatoes, tomatoes, chillies and cardamom, on a table that is no bigger than the computer screen you are reading this on. Puffs of tobacco and pungency of rings of onions dipped in vinegar, and conversations hanging on to glossy lips like cigarettes, and busy waiters signaling each other in their own coded smiles and frowns, businessmen and lovers, guitarists and philanthropist, kurta-clad communists and beady eyed socialites, all find their place in this haven. And like cerulean blue waters soak the background of a Japaneese painting, there is the hum of good music that fills in the little gaps that still remain in the din. Notes from Pearl Jam, Guns and Roses, Pink Floyd, Allman Brothers, U2, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Rolling Stones, find their place at the end of every unfinished sentence of yours, vibrate with every movement of your breath, and then remain pasted on the graffiti that adorn the walls. Time ticks, old faces move out, new faces move in to take their place. Mondegar never stops, metaphorically being alive through the joys and whims that satiate the tables, chuckling at the fancies of Adam and girl…

The Gateway of India is a mere ten minutes walk from the Café. A mosquito net protecting the great monument against the inequities of weather, and the motor-hums of ferries that are roped to the T-shaped rocks, the cloudless inky sky, the sound of moccasins of the beetle-mouthed sailors, calling you to join him in swelling seas at night…

Bombay Blues

“With a little ingenuity and vision, he had made it all but impossible for anyone in the squadron to talk to him, which was just fine with everyone, he noticed, since no one wanted to talk to him anyway.”

So…The radio is again back in my life. And some of the stations actually play nice songs, especially after midnight. The bad thing about the radio is the complete lack of control; you listen to whatever is playing. Only thing you can do is change stations, which again, doesn’t offer a whole array of choices. The good thing about the radio, well, this lack of control!

“I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.”

I have been re-reading The Black Book over and over. There is a magical quality about the book. I don’t know what, and I also don’t know why I am reading it so many times. The important thing is that I am enjoying it. (Camus is also there, but it’s the same old Camus, it doesn’t change color with each reading.)

“If Kerenin had been a person instead of a dog, he would surely have long since said to Tereza, ‘Look, I’m sick and tired of carrying that roll in my mouth every day. Can’t you come up with something different?’ And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”

I have been hunting for the “English August”, the movie, for quite some time.

Me: Do you have English August? I don’t see it on the shelves…

Plant M/ Crosswords/ Landmark Guy: No we don’t.

Me: Can you get it from me?

Ditto: No we cant.

Me: Do you know any other place I can get it from?

Ditto: No.

“I’ve a feeling, August, you’re going to get hazaar fucked in Madna”

There is a reality of books and paintings and music and movies, which is different from the reality we live in. I suppose any work that can create a reality for itself is worth the time. And that gives you a chance, to step out of your life jacket and be in some other world. You might ask why? Well, you figure that out yourself.

“Si se sabe exactamente lo que se va a hacer, ¿para qué hacerlo?”

I am seriously thinking about a trek in Himalayas in summer. You can’t choose a trek browsing the net. The problem with photographs is that they can’t capture the sound of whistling pines, or the smell of misty mountain air, and never the touch of the moment. But then who can?

Insomnia Inc.

For amateur insomniacs, the time between three and four is the weirdest. You can neither go to bed thinking you will wake up early tomorrow and start afresh. Nor can you fathom the courage to forfeit one night’s sleep. In this weirdness abound, you come up with all kinds of little nothings to ease the passage of time.

It’s raining outside. Wildly and the sky is bright purple. The melody of the shower eclipses everything. As if the consonance around was too hollow, I decide to tune in a decidedly incongruous Jokhon Porbe Na More Payer Chinho Ei Baate. And that too by a Bangladeshi singer: a certain Mita-ul-Haq. She whines on some of my favourite lyrics. Fine.

The other option is to pick up a book and read till the cows go graze. The procrastination at the decision itself can be a wonderful activity. Will a Tennyson suit the mood, (it’s still raining, though it has subsided to a palpable drizzle now) or maybe Nietzsche the darkness? Since a Rabindrasangeet is already on song, maybe the surrealism of Jibananda Das will be enchanting? Or say Shanka Ghosh, who lies temptingly across the room. I decide for the day’s old newspaper.

Going straight to the sports page, I realise I have already read each of the articles at least twice. I skip back to the editorial. Lots of serious gubernatorial issues being discussed here; feeling obtusely out of concord, I flip back to page three. Too many pictures, and now too lethargic , I put the paper down.

Despondency can ambush you from nowhere. Depressed, I look up at the clock; it’s ten minutes to four. I start counting my second…

Friction

When I was really small, I thought if the roads were smooth I could tie my legs to the rear bumper of a car and travel all around the world. I thought I would look up at the stars, go from constellation to stories and from stories to reveries, and then suddenly jolt back to the reality of a speed breaker. Beaches would be a great place to go to then, the foam and pearl washed froth splashing on my face, little red crabs chasing me and then borrowing on the upheaval of sand left on my wake. And then the car would take me up the slopes of the Sahayadris and I would watch over my forehead, the grand civilizations of man and machines. I would sink in the black soil, like soaking in a chocolate sponge. And when I jumped across the ridges of the Grand Canyon, I would look down at the meandering ribbon of water, and the walls, copper black and silent. I would travel to the greenest forests of Amazon, and slide on the mossy riverbeds. I would stare at the towering canopies of pine and cedar, and wonder of the heavens beyond. I would plan evenings on Tiger Hills, watching the orange skies shroud the Everest to darkness. I would go back to the comfort of my cloudless mountain mist, and the drink the evening dew. I would wait for the sandman and the blue fairy, I would hear the mountain sing of battles lost, and rivers lament of descending to man. I would fall asleep in the soot and grease from the exhaust of my car, as the smell of burning rubber.

Then I started to grow up, in a world of friction and force. I was taught to follow traffic lights, and zebra crossings. Whenever I try to dream the same dream now, and I find myself trapped under a garbage truck in a traffic jam! The obituary has been written.