A 40 watt dream

Foxy Lady always traveled by bus, not by choice, but hypocritically. This Foxy Lady had an addiction for window seats. She was asthmatic and often in winter she had bouts of breathlessness owing to the rough-dry draughts. She still persevered; sitting in the aisle was suffocating, heck, Orwellian. She shuddered at the thought of a traffic jam with sweat dripping from dark balding men down their soot-skin shirts and hairy arms. She preferred to look out at neon lights adoring billboard like incense sticks around an urban deity. She often lost herself in dreams, which she promptly forced herself to forget once she got back to the reality of the carbon chugging vehicle.

That day she incidentally was not dreaming. The bus was uncannily empty. By the time the bus wrestled itself out of the gallimaufry of Maniktala, a young man with a freshly shaved head had boarded the bus. He said he had lost his father, and being just twenty-two lacked the means to cremate him. He looked earnest and presented a chit of a Death Certificate to his audience who packed this morsel of a spectacle carefully in their Tiffin boxes to office. He needed help. Few fifty plus babus jingle jangled coins in their book pockets. Foxy Lady pulled down her shades from her hair. The young man became locked in her memory as that which caused her hair to ruffle on the way to Ultadanga.

A couple of months later Foxy Lady again spotted the same young man at Esplanade. The same farce, she thought, but she didn’t pull down her shades, it was past nine and she was getting late and impatient. However, as it would unfold, hers were not the only eyes that saw through the postiche (or the lack of it!). The trick failed in the pledge itself. The prestige was obviously not an issue anymore. The young man was dragged off the bus; the bus itself stood its ground though, providing entertainment that outstretched the worth of the fares of its passengers.

Foxy Lady started dreaming again, but this time taking an exception. She sleepwalked. She got down the bus, and took the pseud by the hand and hoicked him in a moving taxi, in matter of seconds, so unexpectedly that the surging, growing mob couldn’t react. Disappointed the bus pedaled off towards the next red light, like a lame kid in Hamlin in search of his Pied Piper.

In the speeding taxi, the young man was too dazzled to speak. Foxy Lady spoke, “Don’t say a word, take it as a birthday present.” The other mumbled, ” But today is not my …”. The taxi braked, Foxy Lady paid the fare and and walked into some lamppost punctuated lane, into a dim yellow 40 Watt darkness.

How the dream ended, and what happened after it did is insignificant and inconsequential.

Sadness in the shape of a crescent

Yesterday had one of those sublimely painful experiences store for me. Painful in the sense that you can’t talk about it to anyone. You have to tolerate the agony of it, till it assumes the semblance of normalcy.

It so happened, with a group of friends, I had lunch in some non-descript restaurant in Park Street, and then walked down Free School Street taking a right from the Salvation Army building to New Market. The idea was to book tickets for a Batman movie in advance (being the devout Batman fan I am) at The New Empire Cinema. I had known that The Lighthouse has become a shopping mall now. On the way, I had also gathered The Globe had been shut down for reasons unknown to my friends. So The New Empire was the only choice!

On reaching The New Empire, the entire bunch of us was shocked to find out that the next change is a potboiler Bollywood movie and not the Batman one we had expected. I didn’t say a word, no goodbye to my friends, came back home and slept off.

Again, you might think, what’s the big deal? Well, I didn’t want to talk about it in the first place, you know…

Poison

It was pain. Pain, which had ceased to be a word, and had taken an animal form as it gnawed at my intestines. My lips were throbbing and it felt the capillaries were bursting one at a time. My oesophagus burnt, dry and pepper-like. I tried to compose myself. And in the jazz and music around me, I just could hear one word ringing through my brain: Poison.

The party was good, starting from the dim metallic lights, the urbane musical score, and the cozy couches, the glitters and jazz, pretty neat. I looked around. Mostly couples busy in their one-two’s, the singles in the bar or on the floor. I had managed to take the quite armchair in one corner, trying to be as nondescript as possible…

With another sharp punch in the gut, I wondered, who could it be? I mean, I wasn’t short of people who would like to do this to me, but why this way and why now? He could have done it one the way back, shooting my skull off it axle. Or pushing me on the tracks as the train approached, or some other safer way, by which it would have attracted lesser attention. I am sure, when I am gone, there’s going to be an investigation and someone’s going to get caught.

I tried to run my mind back a few hours. This was my third drink; I hadn’t taken any food. First drink was from the bar, I saw the barman pour the bourbon into my glass. He couldn’t have possibly done me in, without doing another ten guys at least. Out of the question. I looked up at the guy, as if to counter check my line of reasoning, he was smiling and doing tricks with a bottle of tequila. I had tipped him too, I think…

I took another sip from my glass. My tongue has now swollen. It is impossible to appreciate a good drink with a swollen tongue, trust me. I gulped the liquid down. The oesophagus burnt, as I had expected it to. I waited to see how it felt as it went down to the stomach. Patience, patience, patience (I expected a great deal of pain, probably the finisher). Nothing happened. As I put down the glass, I felt a certain bluish numbness on my fingertips as if the hand that held was not my own. I smiled at myself for thinking up such melodramatic lines. Easy. Relax.

The second drink was a shared one with the host. A generous guy I must say, in the first place to invite me here, and then to share his drink. I have always liked this fellow, appreciated his style as one may say, but from a distance. I was quite frankly shocked more than surprised to be invited to his party; I had postponed a few appointments of my own to be here. And behold!

By now, the lower half was gone, the eyelids drooped, and the lips I would think were bloody or was I just drooling? Whatever. I had envisioned my death quite a few times. I had rehearsed my last words, or if it were so that I was dying alone, what I would write down as my last message to posterity. I had always believed the best death was of a soldier, and better than that was that of a fallen climber, dying as a bird, letting going of his wings. Quite romantic, isn’t it? I had even given a passing thought to euthanasia, and spoke to a few friends in phony confidence about giving me the fatal push. I had also, well, as one would have suspected by now, planned my retirement with great care and precision.

I tried to stretch myself in the easy chair a little, and then changed my mind. The pain was staple by now. The fire had spread so much inside me; I had started to feel like the fire. The needles have melted; it was as if the organs, that I knew existed inside me, have always fused into one fluid corrosive mass. I looked at the armrest, the drink, the third drink, glistened with the night and thin fragile rings appeared with each thump of music. I noticed the ochre lights traveling throw the amethyst liquid from the bottom and exploding on the surface, shining off the rim of the glass. I looked on, as a wave of euphoric indifference swept over me.

El laberinto del fauno: A Review

“I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.” – Sir P.G. Wodehouse.

If Guillermo del Toro could add to that, he would say, mix them both! Pan’s Labyrinth, a 2006 Spanish language film, paints a world where the horrors of a civil war torn 1944 Spain, and the horrors of fantasy of a nine-year-old girl meets. The film begins with the protagonist Ofelia and her pregnant mother, setting off to a hilly forest mill to stay with his stepfather Captain Vidal. In those forests, the imaginative Ophelia discovers fairies and a Faun, who tell her she is a princess of the other world and must complete three tasks to get back to her kingdom.

The film shuttles between the apparent bloody reality of the civil war with dying rebels, sympathetic spies and malignant conspiracies running thick, and the earthy fantasies of Ofelia, which are also not free from their terrors. It soon becomes obvious from the violence and thematic cruelties, that it’s not a family film at all, instead a spine chilling spiritual tale. The way it is told holds you tight to your seat, at times with it’s sheer extravaganza, is indeed rare.

The make-up, especially of the faun, is worthy of a few round of applause. The soundtrack is also fitting the tale that is rolling to its tune. The cinematography and art direction are Academy winners. The pastel fairies, the eyeless ogre, the toad and the faun himself are as they come in our childhood dreams. The subtitles written by del Toro ensure that a lot is not lost in translation. The acting again is par excellence.

I wonder if the worlds of Marquez and Borges had been put on screen, it wouldnt have been too different. Sublime and spontaneous, the movie is worth a watch!

The last few days have been hectic, fulfilling and joyful. I have done most of the things I like doing and found new ways of doing them. Well, I cant say any more about that so lets talk about something else.

I have noticed that rains make me pretty sad. Not the walk-in-the-breezy-drizzle kind but the marooned-in-water-logged-street ones. What bothers me most when I am marooned in such a manner is all the talk about Global Warming, If indeed the ice caps melt it would mean so much more rain and so much more getting marooned. It worries me.

I have been watching a lot of Spaghetti Westerns these days. They are hilariously violent. Long live Clint Eastwood.

Reading more Orhan Pamuk otherwise. Istanbul and Other Colours.

And also realized that my distaste for dogs is an acquired thing. I saw in my old family albums that I was very friendly with the canines (and was reciprocated likewise) when I was a toddler. Somewhere down the line, I lost the script it seems.

I guess, I might be quite irregular on this place for sometime now, have found a new(er) love.