Disquiet

Saturday afternoons were a quiet time in the campus. And now with the semester exams around the corner it took an even deserted look. The leisurely crowds that thronged at different corners of the campus and indulged in endless gossip were nowhere to be seen these days.

“It’s like one of the fairy tale cities which have been put to sleep by some evil magician,” she thought as she walked past the co-operative building, where on other days she always found boys sipping cold drinks and gossiping. But today was different. Even on the road towards the library building she didn’t find a single soul. “Maybe, I should have remained in the hostel room,” she thought, by now feeling a little depressed over her own dismal preparation for the imminent exam. But she didn’t feel like going back to her room, where, she knew, she’ll inevitably find her roommate taking a nap. It was a method most of the hostelers used during exam season – sleeping in the afternoon and doing a night-out, studying all night long. She detested it. Moreover, she knew, even if she goes back now, she would neither be able to study nor sleep, however hard she tried.

Absent-mindedly, she walked past the empty classrooms and entered the library. The reading room on the second floor was nearly as deserted; just a few final-year students scattered around the tables with their heads buried in books. For a few moments she just surveyed around the shelves, without knowing what to do. She picked up a Taub & Schilling, flipped through a few pages, and put it back. No, she won’t understand a thing of digital integrated circuits at this moment.

Finally, she picked up a volume of Encyclopedia Britannica and sat on a table near the big glass window. Opening the book, she turned the pages, aimlessly, and pretty soon got bored again. “What if I break into a loud song now? Or scream with all my might?” The impossibility of the situation amused her much, and she turned her head to look out of the window, trying to suppress a giggle. Outside, the last rays of the sun were slipping away. A leafy silence spread all over the campus. Soon, the streetlights would come on to usher in the evening.

She closed the book and rose to leave.

On her way back to the hostel, she stopped by the lake. There wasn’t the faintest of breeze; the waters stood calm in the twilight. For a few minutes she kept gazing at the serene surface, lost in her own thought. Then, just before she was about to walk away, she picked up a pebble and threw it on the lake. Tiny ripples filled the surface, spreading in ever-widening circles.

Tagged

They say, you always remember your firsts. I don’t know if getting tagged for the first time counts as one of your firsts. But I’m worked up, nonetheless.

I’m talking of tagging memes, which keep doing the rounds in blogosphere. I’ve seen them before, and have also enjoyed reading some of the quirky memes. But, well, I never thought I’ll write one myself. To me, it was a silly thing to do.

But, ahem, you sometimes have to eat your own words. And here I’m doing exactly that. (As an afterthought though, I think, it was probably a case of ‘sour grapes.’ The truth was, nobody ever tagged me before.)

Okay, now let’s come to the tag. Plain Jane has tagged me asking to make a list of things that lay by my bedside.

To begin with, I should tell that I don’t have a bedside table or closet. So when I say bedside it actually means the bed itself, except for a few things which lay on the floor but within such close proximity of the bed that they can also be listed as bedside objects.

And now, without further ado, my list:

1. Three candles, which lay on the floor, waiting for a chance to burn on a night when there will be a power cut.
2. An electric iron, which keeps shifting between the bed and the floor.
3. A mosquito repellent and a cell phone charger, either of which I plug into the electric socket before going to sleep.
4. Two books borrowed recently from British Library – Rites of Spring (a collection of short stories) and Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature (an anthology).
5. Nalini Jones’ book What You Call Winter, which I’m currently reading. And My Own Country by Abraham Varghese, which I’ve kept as an alternative read.
6. Illustrated Oxford English Dictionary, which I’ve kept at me bedside for two reasons. One, because it can double up as an extra pillow at times, should I feel the need sometime. Two, as a ready reference, because on many occasions I’ve found myself spoiling my precious sleep trying to figure out the meaning of some silly words.
7. A few desiccated stalks of rajanigandha, lying on the floor, and still giving off a faint fragrance.
8. A pen and two old diaries.
   

Library

A few days back I got myself a British Library membership. Well, honestly, I was a bit disheartened to find that the size of the library was rather small, and the membership fee was rather high. But then, I haven’t been able to locate a decent library in the city so far. So, I decided to give it a try anyway, exorbitant fee notwithstanding.

Anyways, it’s not British Library that I want to write about. I want to write about a different library, a place where I spent much of my childhood and teenage years, and which comes to my mind whenever I browse through books in any library. It was a place which initiated me to the world of books, and gave me an escape from my own boring life. For a nondescript small town, the District Library I frequented was indeed a well stocked library, although a bit carelessly maintained. My adolescent eyes, however, found it to be a place of mystery and dreamlike serenity. Rows and rows of books stacked in tall shelves, almirah-full of hardbound books with golden lettering on their spine, damp dark corners where frail and forgotten books lay among cobwebs and dust, a musty smell of old yellowing pages hanging in air, lengthening shadows stretched across the floor – all these made my visits to the library, often on quiet drowsy afternoons, a sort of dream and adventure.

I could borrow two books at a time, for a fortnight. But often, I’d go back within a week, having read the books back to back. In my early days, however, I didn’t go beyond the children’s section, from where I picked up fairy tales and detective/adventure novels with flashy covers. My reading was further limited by the fact that I didn’t have the confidence to touch the English books – I could read only Assamese and Bengali translations. It would be many years later when, with my teenage restlessness, I would venture out to the books on other shelves, and discover different shores. Those were exciting times as I’d find love, betrayal, conspiracy, pain, and myriad human emotions knocking me over. Sometimes, a book would keep me awake late into the night, with racing heartbeats, and confounding my mind with doubt, guilt, and embarrassment, as if I had tasted a forbidden pleasure.

I often wonder, what I’d have done during those rather boring days of my adolescence, if I hadn’t found this treasure-trove of books, where mysteries unfolded, adventures happened, and dreams took wings.

EUFF '08

Just a small piece of info.

Someone looking for information on European Union Film Festival landed up in this blog. Well, I didn’t have any relevant information here, but this query prompted me to find out if there was any info available somewhere else.

Which made me dig out this link.

The 13^th European Film Festival is indeed here. Pune will have it from 24 to 30 April. Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, and Kozhikode are the other cities where this festival will be staged.

Eggs and vegetables

It’s after weeks that I go to buy some vegetables from the old woman who sits around the corner with her baskets spread around her. She feigns surprise at seeing me after so long, and asks in her funny broken Hindi, “Arre, kya khaya itne din?”

Now, maybe, she’s not genuinely interested in what I ate all these days; she is probably more concerned about whether I’m buying vegetables from somewhere else. But, she asks it with such a big grin that I have no option but to grin back.

After I paid, she drops a free lemon in the bag of vegetables. Well, this again might be her marketing trick, I assume, but it makes me happy, anyway. All I can think at that moment is I’m going to make a lemonade when I get home.

Next, I go to the small grocery shop from where I buy eggs. This grocer is a talkative man, and sometimes, when he’s in a good mood, he tells me how he went different places while he was serving in the Army; or how the prices of eggs have fallen because of Bird Flu scare; or how he once saw a reckless bike accident (he told this one when he saw a few scratches on my face). Well, he can be irritating at times; particularly when I’m in a hurry. But, some days, when I haven’t talked to anyone the whole day, his talks amuse me much.

Sigh!

I know. I know I am a boring person.

Some rain and a book

Several good things happened this weekend. I’ll mention two of them.

First, it rained. On Saturday evening came the first rain of the season, catching most of us unawares. I was riding home and was on the University Circle flyover when I saw the dense dark clouds looming large. The wind was catching speed, dry leaves were fluttering around, and everyone looked up at the sky and hurried up to reach their destinations before the rains started. I too sped up. It started drizzling while I was still on the road, but it was only after I reached home that the rains came down in torrents. Reaching home, I opened the windows wide, dragged a chair to the balcony, and sat with legs stretched on the railings, ready to watch the show.

Second, I read Ruskin Bond’s autobiography Scenes From a Writer’s Life, which I had been wanting to read, but couldn't find anywhere. Then, this weekend I got a call from Landmark Bookstore informing me that they have brought the book, for which I had put a requisition earlier. I bring the book home and finish it at one go (except for a few hours of sleep in between), which is rare because I’m generally a slow reader and I amble through a book for weeks and months. But, there’s something about Ruskin Bond’s prose that makes me read non-stop. And this book was no exception. I liked it right from the Dedication page, which reads ‘For you, my gentle reader’. (How can you not love a book which is dedicated to you?) Anyway, I had been familiar with most the events in Ruskin Bond’s life by virtue of my previous readings of his books, but as he says, ‘the autobiographical element is present in much of my work, but there is really more fiction than the reader may realize.’ So, when I read this book, bare of all the imagination and fiction he creates around him, his story looked more forlorn, more heartbreaking.

Indeed, after reading Scenes From a Writer’s Life you realize why V.S. Naipaul says, ‘I have read nothing like that from India or anywhere else. It's very simple. Everything is underplayed, and the truths of the book come rather slowly at you. He is writing about solitude, tremendous solitude. He himself doesn't say it. He leaves it all to you to pick up.’

At NFAI

Summer afternoons are getting rather dull. And in the hope of livening up a little, on one of these particularly boring summer afternoons, I decided to pass my time watching a couple of films that were being screened at NFAI, as part of the Pune Film Treasures Festival. They had been showing films there for the last three days, but I somehow couldn’t catch up with any of them. There were two reasons, actually. First, I got to know about it pretty late. And second, I wasn’t really interested in the films they were showing. But as I said, when summer evenings get rather dull, you really want to do something. So, yesterday, I forced myself out of office and walked into a cozy nook of the NFAI auditorium quite ahead of time. The auditorium, with its rather cool interiors and dim lights, was very sleep-inducing, and I would really have dozed off had it not been some chattering ladies at my back, who kept talking till someone walked up the dais to introduce the film to be shown.

The first screening was Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris, which I found rather disappointing and baffling. Well, maybe it was my inability to understand the film, but I couldn’t really grasp what the film was trying to say.

The second film, Fritz Lang’s 1953 film noir The Big Heat, was much like a typical good vs. bad story, where an honest cop investigating a case goes a little too far and pays with his wife’s life. The Big Heat is a story of his vengeance. Gripping and fast-paced, it doesn’t waste a moment. Of course, I won’t call it a great film – the film feels rather simplistic and uni-dimensional – but it sure had the charm.

It was good fun.

Fragments

Once in a while there comes a book which opens the windows to the heart of its characters with such honesty and finesse that you don’t even realize how and when these characters leap from the pages and become real images, complete with their own voices, mannerisms, and eccentricities; their innermost thoughts lying before us, unwrapped of all the nice coverings.

Anjum Hasan’s debut novel Lunatic in My Head is one such book.

The book begins on a drizzly Shillong afternoon and goes on to traverse the lives of the three protagonists – Firdaus Ansari, the middle-aged college teacher who is trying to negotiate with her unwritten PhD thesis and a much younger fickle-minded tribal boyfriend, both unsuccessfully; Aman Moondy, the twenty-three-year-old who sees life through the music of Pink Floyd, is infatuated with Concordella, and is preparing to attempt IAS for the second time; and Sophie Das, the eight-year-old girl who realizes that “it was incumbent on her to lie, that the truth was often so shabby and unconvincing that she needed to embellish it merely in order to have something interesting to say.”

Anjum Hasan’s observation is sharp and her understanding of people and place is through. But more than anything else, I liked Lunatic in My Head for its language. Be it when Aman “on the bed with its clean sheet smelling of detergent… lay on his side crying, his tears running across the bridge of his nose and down the side of his face into one of his ears”; or when Firdaus “occasionally look up from her reading and stare at the wall, trying to form a sentence or two in her head, but then inevitably dismiss it as weak and unoriginal, and continue with her reading”; or when Sophie, punished by her teacher to stand at the rear of the classroom, “stood at her new position in silence, flaking off the plaster from the wall with her thumbnail”, I paused many a times while reading, overwhelmed by the images portrayed.

I think this is where fiction triumphs – despite all the disclaimers, we know that the book, taken as a whole, might be an act of imagination, but when broken down to fragments, each piece is a reflection of our own lives.

And Anjum Hasan has collected these fragments with much care and has given us a wonderful book.

Wayward

You are sick of this idleness. You want to do something. Maybe, write something. And, whatever it is, you want to do it now. Yes, now.

All you do in a day is go for a 9-to-5 job and cook your dinner. Okay, there’s some amount of TV and books as well. But that’s pretty much it. Sometimes, when you lie idle and keep staring into the ceiling, too many weird thoughts come to your mind, and you realize, with a sigh, that your mind has indeed become a devil’s workshop.

You pause here. Hmm, you have begun well, but now what. How to take it forward?

You look around. You try to gather your thoughts. You remember that you’ve recently read an article where the author has warned, “Writing Fiction is not for the faint-hearted. The mortality rate is higher than that of Test pilots.”

But you are not to be deterred by such warnings, of course. Writers are a funny breed of people, you know, they love to say funny things. Not to take them too seriously. After all, the above-mentioned author, by the end of the essay, advises, ‘Never listen to older writers.’

Well, that’s all fine – these writers and their funny quotes. What annoys you, however, is that all these unnecessary readings that you do, affects you adversely, and pulls your thoughts to multiple directions, muddling you further.

Oh, see where you began, and where you’ve reached! It’s always like this, you realize – the thing you begin with, end up as something utterly unrecognizable, as if by some magic.

You give too much liberty to your thoughts, you realize. You are too lazy and lenient to achieve anything, leave alone writing.

You pause here again. A few minutes later, you find yourself counting how many paragraphs you’ve written – eight already! Not bad.

Suddenly, you feel content and happy. You don’t want to calculate where you began and where you have reached.

You’re a hopeless piece, no doubt, but you don’t care.

The stalker

She stops walking suddenly.

My heart skips a beat.

“Shit!” I mutter with disgust and quickly hide my face behind the long strips of gutkha pouches hanging down from the roadside paan shop.

Why does she stop like this today? Could she sense that I was following her? Did I make any mistake? She did seem to be walking a little self-consciously for the last few minutes – too many thoughts come to me simultaneously.

I wait with bated breath; my heart thumps vigorously. What if she walks up to me now and confronts me?

I peep at her – she is bending down and taking off the shoe from her left leg.

I freeze like I’ve seen something ominous. I almost feel like fainting. My head goes blank. Is she actually going to charge towards me with that shoe in her hand? Well, doesn’t seem plausible, but how can one be sure.

I peep again – she now stands on one leg (the shoeless leg bent slightly above ground). I eagerly wait for her next movement. She takes a few seconds to balance herself first. Then she upturns the shoe in her hand and shakes it. A pebble drops off.

Ha! that's it then.

By the time I've recovered, I see her walk away again.

I take a few seconds to decide and then ask the panwallah, "One Navy Cut."

I light the cigarette and watch her walk away.

March-ing

Almost a week into March, and I've not come up with a post. Not that it’s absolutely important or something (it’s just a self-gratifying exercise, as I’ve admitted before). It makes no difference anywhere, anyway. And most probably, barring a couple of people, nobody will even notice if I stop this blog today. Which is justified because I cannot claim that anybody might gain anything by reading this blog. There are better things to read and better things to do in this world than to come here and read my ramblings. But if you still come here to read, you’ve got patience!

But anyway, I think I make a post because it makes me happy. That’s the simplest reason. I cannot straightway tell what makes me happy, though. Maybe I get a faint feeling of accomplishing something when I put up a new post. I know it’s silly to think that way – writing a stupid post and comparing it to accomplishing something. But how can I help if I feel just that way? Silly me.

Oh, too much rambling already. Okay, now for the actual post – which, by the way, is nothing but a bulleted list of stray thoughts (you’re familiar with it by now, I suppose).

• I see people going places. To different parts of the world. To places faraway and unknown. I admire them. (Maybe, slightly jealous too.) I too wish to go away like them. But all I do is sit alone and dream.

• I come home early and stand on the balcony. It’s dusk and the children are shouting and running in the smallish park outside. In the gathering darkness, their shouts of joy fill up my empty apartment.

• I get the news of a death. He wasn’t someone I knew personally but Sheelabhadra was an author I liked to read. Incidentally, when I got the news, I was reading one his books, which I picked on my recent visit to my home town .
  

• I see a change of season taking place. The days are hotter now; the wind is drier and dustier. Walking home in the evening I think of rains. It's not yet time for rain, of course. Pre-monsoon storms are still about a month away. But in my mind, I make it a point to see when the first rain arrives.
  

On another day

I think I need to tell this – that despite the inclination towards all things sad and melancholic, I'm essentially a happy person. As happy as I can be these days. If you thought that I sound like a poor depressed soul all the time, you were obviously mislead.

Just as there are days of melancholy, there are days of plain happiness as well. Days, when I wake up to something happy, without even knowing what it is, without finding any apparent reason. I become happy for something I cannot quite fathom. I don't know what prompts it. Maybe, it is the quietness of an early morning, the cold touch of steel railings in the balcony, the shaft of sun's rays near the doorstep, or just the whiteness of the ceiling I keep staring into.

I don't know. I can't tell.

But I find it nothing less than magical. How and what constitute such a moment of pure bliss?

Perhaps, I'll never find out. Perhaps, I should not even try to.

I'm just thankful for these fleeting moments. Moments, when I feel that everything is well with the world, including myself.

Of course it doesn't last long. But it is worth it while it lasts.

One of your days

There are some days, you know perhaps, when you wake up in the morning and the first thing you feel is a strange sense of melancholy.

It might be a rainy day with a slate-grey sky when you want it to rain all day long, and looking out of the window you watch the trees drench quietly, all alone.

Or it might be a hot sunny morning when you wake up to the sound of your old noisy fan, and coming out of your room you wonder how swiftly the world passes you by.

Or it might be one of those chilly winter mornings when your warm bed feels like heaven, and when the thick curtain of fog outside reminds you the days that has disappeared somewhere.

Or it might be a pale day of autumn when the roads you take are full of whispering dead leaves and dusty winds.

Or it might be a day just like today – when, after a long day, you fall back to your room with an empty feeling. You listen to your favourite music, you pick up your favourite book, you stand before the mirror and smile, but you cannot drive that emptiness away. And then you open the window, an evening breeze gushes in, and you see the moon rising, which only reminds you, however hard you try to forget, how lonely you had been today.

Coming back

In case you haven't noticed, I had been away for two whole weeks. I was on a impromptu break.

During this time I went to my home town, visited a few other places and people, and generally passed my time at home doing nothing.

It was a break from the routine I follow here. I had no work, cellphone, computer, or newspaper to occupy my time.

I had a feeling I'd have a good time without any of these. But, strangely, all my time I was missing these things there. I was thinking about the things I do here, when I was there. I had a feeling that I might be missing out on something. That there might be important things happening in my absence. That I might be wanted here.

But, obviously, no such thing happened. And now that I'm back, I find that nothing really has changed. Things are still the same on my desk. And nobody has even noticed that I was away.

So, it's back to my old routine. And I'm back to the things I missed.

But now, suddenly, I feel like running away again.

Isn't life disappointing?

Weekend watch

Whew! Lots of films happened this weekend. Well, not really chosen with much care and judgment – I watched rather indiscriminately – and I must say I liked every bit of it.

I began with Gandhi, My Father, which explores the tumultuous relation between Mahatma Gandhi and his son Harilal. I liked bits of it, even appreciated the performances, but remained unmoved at the end.

Then came Chashme Buddoor, the early 80’s romcom. It was a delight to watch Faroque Sheikh and Deepti Naval, the melodrama notwithstanding. Maybe, I won’t want to watch this film repeatedly, but while I watched, I could not suppress a smile on my face – the cuteness was absolutely infectious. And yes, I always liked the song ‘Kahan se aaye badra’ from this film.

Lakshya, the third on my platter, was a film which I had watched earlier on TV, but always in bits and pieces. So, when I watched it this time, at one go, I could not help but admire the film – the beautiful shots, the understated performances, the believable actions. Okay, the film is not perfect – it does not go beyond popular stereotypes – but it has an earnestness that is difficult to shake off.

The time I chose to watch Charulata was perfect – a languid Sunday afternoon. Incidentally, the film also begins on a lonely afternoon of Charu’s life. Charulata has been regarded as one of the most exquisite and flawless of Satyajit Ray’s films, and it’s easy to see why – the film is beautiful, subtle, and poetic. The rest of the afternoon, after I watched Charulata, I lay snuggled in my bed, enveloped with a feeling of subtle melancholy.

I ended my watching spree with Sleepless in Seattle, which was on HBO last night. Not much to say about this one, but it was a good company on a Sunday night.

Well that was all to my weekend.

P.S. Oh, I have one DVD still waiting, Jab We Met, which I’m going to watch soon.

Snapshots

• The lone banyan tree stands amidst the vast green paddy fields. In the hot summer afternoons, when unruly wind comes rippling through the top of the paddy fields, nobody goes near the tree for fear of disturbing the spirits that dwell there. Only a few sparrows hop around in its shade.

• The mango flowers are in bloom. Buzzing bees, queues of ants, and chirpy birds swarm around the tree all day. A mild heady scent stands in its cool shade.

• It rains all night. Rainwater leaks in through the old tin roof and forms a puddle on the floor. Somewhere in the dark outside, a bunch of frogs croak in unison.

• The wide river flows quietly. On its banks, fluffy white kaash flowers dance in the breeze. In the midday sun, the sand on the river bank shines like silver.

• Shy and delicate, the tiny white flowers bloom in the evening, give fragrance all night, and fall off at dawn – it wilts away in the sunlight. The flower of sadness, they call it.

Part(y)ing

We sit together on a big table and talk loudly while we wait for the lunch to arrive. We have already scrabbled with the menu, discussed at length about the dishes we want to order, and kept talking all the while. The restaurant is full and the food is late to arrive. But nobody seems to mind today -- we are more than happy to go on chattering.

"Maybe this is the last time we all are eating together," someone says, perhaps trying to remind us that something is happening for the last time.

But we ignore the thought. We all have new things coming up in our lives and we don't seem to have the time to pause and ponder. Or, even if someone wants to, nobody wants to show.

Someone clicks photos, someone poses, someone pulls someone's legs, someone plays with the cutlery -- we all are happy with the moment.

The lunch arrives, we eat with relish, pay the bill, and move away.

"We all might not be together again. But when we were, we were happy. At least, that is what I would like to believe," I say to myself and go my own way.

January

This January has definitely managed to surprise me.

First, there are these upcoming changes at workplace. But let's keep workplace out of this, for the moment.

Second, I've managed to acquire a few scratches on my Activa and myself. You see, the mandatory accident has already happened. But, I'm not going to give you a detailed description of that either.

Third, I decided to let go the Film Festival this time. Well, it has got something to do with the accident, but had I wanted I could still manage. But somehow, for some strange reason, I didn't want to.

Fourth, I read Vikram Seth's novel in verse, The Golden Gate, which I found rather witty. To read a novel in verse -- it didn't sound interesting -- but, at the end, I liked.

Fifth, I found that I can be particularly talkative, nonsensically talkative, and can be a pain to your ear.

At Karla Caves*

"Wow! This is awesome."

"Stand near the pillar. Yes, a little closer. Ready. Say cheese."

"This cave is hewn out of a single giant rock. This used to serve as a prayer hall..."

"Where's Pinky? Pinky?"

"Can you imagine what it would have been like to live in this place, centuries back, amongst the reverberating sound of sacred chants..."

"Look at the details of this sculpture. You can see the ornaments she's wearing. Whose face it might have been, who knows?"

"How long it'll take us to reach Bombay?"

"It's amazing how they found this big rock on a hilltop, and working with chisels and hammers for centuries, could carve this magnificent structure."

"It's a pity! They should maintain this site in a better way. The authorities..."

"The signboard says it dates back to 2nd Century B.C."

"Look Maa, the elephant's trunk is broken."

"Let's go now. I'm hungry."

"... and we talk of patience!"


*At Karla Caves, some talk with awe, some remain quiet, and some others just overhear.

What's new

The new year began on a little shaky note.

A few unforeseen things, some lurking uneasiness, along with a little apprehension and confusion thrown in.

However, on the positive side:

• I'm riding on a new Activa. No more haggling with autowallahs, hopefully.
• I'm going for walks in the mornings. Don't know how long I'll be able to continue, but I feel good that I've made a beginning.
• I'm waiting for the Pune International Film Festival, which begins on 10th January. Hope to catch some interesting films.
• I'm proving myself to be a decent cook.