Passerby

• Tired of walking aimlessly, and feeling hungry, I choose a place, aptly named Sidewalk, where I sit down on their roadside table and wait for my sandwich. From the nearby temple, I see three devout-looking, sari-clad housewives coming out, chatting amongst themselves. As they are walking by, they stopped briefly near my table, and engaged in some mild argument. Then one of them turned to me and asked in a rather crisp and confident English, "To go to Esquare, do we take a right or left?" I tell her the way to the multiplex, and she departs with a hasty thanks.
  
  
• At the big store, I look bewildered at the rack of yoghurts – various brands, big and small sizes, flavoured and plain. As I stand confused, a girl walks up and starts looking up the same rack, all the while chirping on her phone. She is so small-built, I almost mistake her for a school-going kid, until I hear her voice clearly, which is much mature and womanly. "You always think I lie, don't you? But I never lie," she speaks on her phone and then walks away, without picking any yoghurt.
  
  
• A little detour from the bustling main road takes me to this neat residential area built around a splendid-looking lake. On the edge of this lake are inviting green lawns, leafy green trees, and serpentine walkways. As I walk by, I find this elderly woman reading newspaper. She is sitting on a low wall, basking in the mild winter afternoon sun, and her dangling feet making happy movements midair, just like a schoolgirl.
  
  
• After my weekend vegetable shopping from the mandi, on my way back home, I pass by this narrow alley with rows of tiny cramped houses. In front of a blue-painted door, a frail-looking pregnant woman is slowly putting a bucketful of washings on the clothesline, her hands barely reaching the high-strung rope.
  
  
• At the traffic signal, the girl on the motorbike stops abruptly and looks at her watch with evident impatience. No sooner that the light turns to green, she zooms past in a flash, her hairs flying like a running horse's mane.
  

Short

The kitten died. Probably, in its sleep, quietly, lying on the bundle of rags that served as its bed. In the cold morning, its tiny body was was stiff and its head awkwardly tilted. One of its unmoving paw was still touching the milk bowl.

It had a brief period of stay in the house – from being an abandoned, wildly meaowing, tiny kitten rescued from the backyard to being a warm ball curled up at the feet when watching TV – hardly a month.

Now it lies buried in a small pit, which will get swamped in the next monsoon, and then overgrown with weeds.

Post match summary

After the games are over, we lie down amidst the scent of wet earth and trampled grass.

Springtime

April has brought in several colors. Increasingly, I can see red, pink, lavender, and yellow flowers sprouting from seemingly unexpected corners -- by the roadside, in front of the apartment building, near the office building. Out on a walk this afternoon, I spotted these blooming gulmohars.


And some yellow flowers that I could not identify.


PS: I'm resorting to the old tactic of putting up photos when words are becoming difficult to come by.

Sacred Games

In my recent effort to catch up on dust-gathering, neglected books from my pile, I picked up Sacred Games sometime at the beginning of the month. Obviously, I was being ambitious because running into 900 odd pages, Sacred Games is a mammoth book, and looked daunting in every way – more so because of the fact that my copy was hard-bound and wrist-spraining heavy. But, once started, I was surprised how the pages flew once, and how it made me eager for the unfinished pages. In fact, many a times, I found myself hurrying through things so that I could go back to the book and resume reading. This is something that doesn’t always happen.

After A Suitable Boy, which was even longer by a few hundred pages, Sacred Games has to be the only such big-size book I could ever manage to finish. And in fact, though these two are very disparate – not only in their settings, but also in their tones – I repeatedly found myself comparing them both. People argue that besides the voluminous size and the sprawling saga there are no common threads that can link the two books – while one is set in set in the languorous time of just-independent India, the other is set breathtakingly close to our time. However, the common thread to me lay in the detailing – each has narrative that are painstakingly developed, a very close and compassionate eye for fleshing out the characters, a subtle way of conveying emotions through nuanced gestures.

Anyway, this is not supposed to be a comparison (which I don’t like to do), so I shall stick to my feelings for Sacred Games only. Like always, I begin a book by reading the blurb first. And the blurb of Sacred Games described it somewhat as a cat-and-mouse story of a disillusioned policeman versus a gangster of organized crime, and how their stories intertwine in the backdrop of a metropolis. As it turns out, this description is hugely inadequate in telling us what the book is about. Yes, it does have the crime thriller bit, the occasional racy suspense, but at the end it goes much beyond. Although the metropolis and policemen and criminals occupy much of the space, it carefully traverses to spread into a big canvas interspersed with a mind-boggling array of characters and plots. So, you have the reference of small towns of the Hindi heartland, far-flung corners of north-eastern India along with its insurgency and border problems, the glimpse of secret service agents, life of illegal migrants from neighboring countries, workings of Naxalite camps, the spiritual gurus, and even the horrors of partition. Plus, there are the heartbreaks, betrayals, adultery, extortion, murder, smuggling, police-criminal nexus, and, in unusual ways, tenderness and love as well. In short, enough to get you hooked.

However, despite such a spicy concoction, Sacred Games holds on to its own – it says everything matter-of-factly, explores the inner workings by going beyond the superficial, and Vikram Chandra, the author, does this with compassion and style. A special mention should also go to two things I found compelling – one, how Bollywood plays a big role in the whole book, right from the songs, films, filmstars, to how the characters are often molded by this invisible juggernaut; two, the language, which so heavily draws from the language of the metropolis in which it is set, throwing unadulterated cuss-words, film song lyrics, names of food items, mythologies, and many other words of endearment, disappointment, and anger. In fact, Bollywood and underworld is so heavily used that, at times, the real and fictitious characters are found mingling delightfully close at hand. And, about the language, it suffices to say that Sacred Games may have lost out much of its charm had it not been the unabashed use of language.

And finally, as I closed the book, I realized how the book carefully entrusted me, the reader, with more knowledge than any of the characters in it had. All the protagonists see a picture that is essentially incomplete and there are many things that are not revealed to them; they do not see the undercurrents that flow underneath, the motives, and the reason that drives each other’s behavior. In that, the reader gets an elevated position from where he/she can make more sense of what is happening below. However, ironically, this privileged knowledge does not give us comfort; it only deepens our feeling of helplessness as we watch the game go on.

A much satisfying read and well worth the wrist sprain.

Love, scribbles, and margins

Sometimes, books borrowed from libraries prove to be rather interesting – you lay your hands on unknown authors and surprising topics. However, the book I’m currently reading, Alain de Botton’s Essays in Love, is proving to be interesting in ways more than one. Of course, it’s a rather interesting book – a non-fiction in the guise of fiction – where the two central characters are essentially used to emphasize and illustrate the emotions associated with falling in and out of love. Love itself is clinically dissected and various philosophical thoughts are liberally used with much deadpan humor. I’m halfway through the book and enjoying it. Besides what the book is about, however, there’s another interesting thing about the copy in my hand. A previous reader (a much involved and love-struck, I assume) has, with his/her pencil, made marks in the margin (scribbled stars) where he/she found it rather affecting. What’s even more interesting is that the stars have grown in number (much like the movie star ratings) according to the degree of emotion the person felt at the time of reading it. For example, a line like “Stendhal believed that love could be brought about only on the basis of a fear of losing the loved one…” managed to get one star, but the line “Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally ‘together’ – when subjectively, we feel dispersed and confused.” managed to get three stars. At places, the sentences have also been underlined (which is probably pretty common), the stars have grown in size (this must be unique), and a smiley has appeared (a result of too much chatting?). And finally, as if to sum up, on the last page there is also a list of important page numbers that this reader has made based on his/her reading and scribbled a line above the list that read, curiously enough, as “time wasting proposal” (whatever that means!).

Needless to say, this reader’s antics have heightened my reading pleasure. I personally don't like scribbling in the margins, but I'm ready to waive off for this margin-scribbling reader who seemed rather besotted with the whole idea of love. The author of the book must have been happy to find such a curious and keen reader who he’d been able to affect in such profound ways. I, for one, would have been.

Someplace else

• Standing near the timber bridge (from where I clicked the photo), you can see two distinct trees – a tall coconut tree and a rather dwarfish banyan tree – standing, rather forlornly, in a vast field. Except for them, the landscape looks flat, empty, and quiet. “There used to be another coconut tree, a pair, and the house was just in the middle of them,” my father said when I showed him the photo. He then went on and showed me where the small pond with blooming lotuses was, where the neighbor’s boundary began, and where, during monsoon, he put traps and caught fish. “Three decades back, there was a village here and this was our home,” he said.

• The mango tree in their courtyard, my mother used to say, was of indeterminable age. According to her, it had the same old and gnarled look ever since she remembered – it neither showed much vigor nor did it die. Rather, this tree weathered many a storm and acted as a center of all household activity – during Summers, it used to provide cool shade; in Winters, the communal fireplace used to come up under this tree; on a flat stone near its root, masalas used to be ground; and the buffaloes used to lie around it at night. In fact, one of my mother’s favorite stories about this tree was (which she described rather animatedly) how during the 71’s Bangladesh War stray bullets flew and wedged on the very trunk of this tree. The tree remains till date. But, the courtyard is now empty and there’s no one left to tell stories about the tree.

• The temple atop the hillock is modest by every standard. When we reach the place, there’s none of the hullabaloo that usually surrounds a busy temple. Encouraged by the lovely mild day of Winter, I walked about the place to explore more. Although never been to this place, I had heard many a stories related to this temple. For example, I knew the big entrance with statues of twin lions atop it, the adjacent pond where shoals of fish came up to feed on thrown food, the flight of stairs where rows of lights were lit on deepavali night, the little garden in front from where fresh flowers were plucked every morning, the nearby tomb of an exceptionally tall Mughal general who came here to conquer but ended up dying in a bout of malaria. It was funny how I knew the place without ever seeing it. And maybe because I had those stories swarming in my head, sitting on the steps I started conjuring up an image – of a young woman slowly climbing up the stairs, her bare feet dusty from all the walking, her hair still wet from the bath, her forehead glistening with perspiration, her slightly smudged vermilion bindi shining in the sunlight, her hands holding a puja thali, her face lit up with a smile – of my young mother.

Homewards

In all likelihood, this looks like to be the last post of the year. But, this is not a summary of the year gone by nor do I intend to put up a year-end post. In fact, even if I try, which I did for a while, I don't seem to find any high (or low) points that could distinguish this year from other years. Of course, when I speak of an uneventful year, I refer purely to a personal state of being; apparently, earth-shattering events are occurring every other day in other peoples' lives, which I'm completely oblivious of. Once in a while, it does scare me though -- that I cannot feel any rise and fall in life, which everyone keeps talking of; that I am not getting too worked up by the seemingly endless amount of time I'm letting go, doing nothing; that, despite everything, I still feel as clueless or confused as ever. In short, horrifyingly enough, the start or end of a year seem to have lost whatever residual feelings of hope or despair they used to carry; and instead, giving way to a cold indifference.

Anyway, the year's going to end in a few more days. As with every year, I saw people moving in and out, rearranging their lives -- some committing to new things, some rising to new heights, some falling by the wayside, and some vanishing altogether. Oh, wait! Now that I started typing in, I do seem to feel certain moments linger in my head, some memories that I didn't care to look back, some days that indeed were different. Still, what difference those moments and memories are going to make, I am still uncertain of. As for now, I'm waiting with my packed bags, ready to start my much-awaited year-end vacation, a time when I reach a Zen-like state of mind and speculate on the greater scheme of things.

See you all, hopefully more regularly, in the coming new year.

P.S. New year wishes, everyone!

Behind the scenes

The fragrant flowers

Late in the evening, if you came out to the veranda, you could tell the unmistakable fragrance of sewali flowers wafting from the corner of the courtyard. It didn’t take much wind to carry it; the fragrance would spread even when the air stood still, though not very far. And if you stepped down the veranda, notwithstanding the mild cold of early winter, and took a stroll near the tree, you would see it laden with tiny white flowers much like some studded jewelry. The air around the tree would be heavy with the subdued fragrance of newly bloomed flowers and you might possibly even want to pick up a few of the fallen flowers to be put by your bedside. Although difficult to describe in words this fragrance is variously associated with sadness, melancholy, or longing. It is notorious for making people pensive.

The river by the cemetery

The leafy green cemetery does not see too many visitors. Often enough, you would find yourself to be the only person walking by its neatly maintained rows of stones. Pink bougainvilleas and dark-green creepers adorn the walk-way that runs through the middle of the cemetery. Tall sandstone pillars bearing the names of unknown soldiers stand in the formation of an arc. On the grassy lawn, sparrows hop around much of the time. But, it’s the quietly flowing river that runs just behind the cemetery that gives the place its peace and charm. In such a peaceful little place, you might find it is easy to forget what prices these soldiers – young, old, and unnamed, coming from faraway corners of the world – had to pay to wage a war, and then perish, in a foreign land.

The Deepavali diya

As you would agree, Deepavali, contrary its beautiful name, is often more associated with noise than with light. But still, nothing captures the essence of Deepavali more than the image of rows of flickering diyas. Or, for that matter, even a single solitary diya that you might have lit and left alone on the balcony.

Wild grass

If you climbed the hillock that lay behind the buildings, and walked a bit further, you would reach a relatively flat grassy land that is unusually green for this time of the year. Partly because of the abundant rains in the last few days, and partly because not many people come walking to this side, the grasses here have grown tall, reaching as far as your waist. Tired by the climb, if you wished to have a little rest, you could sit on the rocks that lay partly hidden among the grasses and spend a few moment watching the grasses sway in the late-afternoon breeze as grasshoppers, dragonflies, and tiny colorful butterflies hop around.

Weary legs

If you happened to finally make it to the small, almost camped, cave that is carved on the wall of a giant stone on top of the hill fort, a stunning view would await you. As far as your eyes could see, there would be hills, their cliffs draped with passing clouds. In the valley below, the early morning mist would still be lingering languidly. With such a view for company, and the feel of gentle breeze blowing into your face, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to give your weary legs some much-needed rest here. If you wished, reclining on the stone walls, you could also click a photo or two.

The baoli

You would be pleasantly surprised if you discovered this baoli on the hilltop. It is hidden by a thick growth of wild shrubs and is often missed out by people who climb this hill fort. Nevertheless, once you have found it, you would definitely be impressed by the structure. Two flights of perpendicular stairs would lead you to the underground source of water that might once have served many (legend has it, that this place was once a thriving village that got abandoned after a vicious plague epidemic). Sitting on the steps of this dark and cool baoli you might experience time standing still between the ancient brick walls.

Picture-perfect?

I had been going click-happy for some days now. And some of my experiments, obviously, had to spill over to the blog. So, here's an assortment.

the fragrant flowers

the river by the cemetery

the deepavali diya

wild grass

weary legs

the baoli

Of course, there are stories associated with each of these photos. But, those I save for another day.

Here and there

• The view of sea in the rains is an awesome sight – huge waves crash rhythmically on the sandy beach, the horizon is blurred with dark mass of ominous looking clouds, and the strong gale hits the face carrying hint of salt. It’s beautiful, yet you cannot miss the underlying fierceness of Nature on display. We just sit on the sand, looking at this splendour and hear the roar of the sea, as it rains all around.

• At night, in the more trendy part of the beach, inside a few winding lanes, the clubs, pubs, and discos come alive. Live music, karaoke, and general noise floats in air. Huge swarms of people throng for fun and there is a festive bustle all around. For a few moments, it is possible to get so overwhelmed with the goings on around you that the sea, which is just a stone’s throw away, is almost forgotten. It could as well be a Saturday night in a city pub.

• At the cathedral, despite the sizeable number of crowd, it’s surprisingly quiet. People sitting on pews – newlyweds, families, backpackers, nuns – all look around the huge hall and the altar in front. Among the group of mostly elderly nuns I spot a young one, almost a teenager, who looks a bit lost. She looks around at the surrounding grandeur in awe, looking much like a young girl who has caught a glimpse of some film star.

• At the seaside fort, it’s all noise and crowd and cameras. It’s difficult to imagine how this place might have served as a watering hole for Portuguese sailors who landed here after months of travel on high seas. Walking around, I hear a Bengali father talk to his little son. Both of them seem to be unimpressed with the fort. The father says, “After watching Agra fort, all other forts seem quite run-down and not-so-grand, isn’t it son?” The son nods his little head in quiet agreement.

• In search of some quieter beaches, we move down south on our last day of stay. Incidentally, it turns out to be an extremely pleasant drive. It’s a sunny day and the roadsides look impossibly green as we pass by paddy fields, ponds, coconut groves, and lovely little villages with quaint churches of all sizes. Our tour culminates with a sumptuous lunch we have at a quiet wayside restaurant. We gorge on the food, talk inanities, and mostly savour the salubrious air of sea.
  

Quotidian

At first he thought it was raining in his dreams – as if he were somewhere up in the mountains and a mass of clouds covered him up with a sheet of drizzle. He seemed to be walking, surprisingly weightless, through a haze. He even felt the chill in the air and a whiff of wet barks and leaves. “Isn’t there a place dry and warm?” a voice seemed to sound in his head.

He rolled in his bed and a dim gray morning light, filtered through an overcast sky, fell on his face. Through the open door of the balcony his eyes first fell on the series of fat raindrops that clung to the iron railing. “So, it’s indeed raining,” he thought, realizing the source of chill in his dream. He instinctively checked the time – he had half an hour to get ready – and then looked out of the open door again. With a blurred vision – for not only because he was still half awake, but also because he wasn’t wearing his specs – he saw the raindrops trembling and falling off the iron railing, and then being replaced by another set of equally fat raindrops. “Is this how everything gets replaced, like raindrops?” he thought, “even memories?” For a few minutes, he got lost in a reverie. “Damn!” he suddenly muttered, “these rainy mornings sure give me some melancholic thoughts.” He stared at the white walls, a favorite method to calm his head, and looked intently at the hanging cobwebs.

Anyway, after a while of staring at cobwebs and shuffling in the bed, he woke up fully to realize that he had overstayed in bed. He hurriedly got ready, picked up the things he needed to carry, wore his shoes, checked for any electric switches that might be left on, and then finally locked the front door. He climbed down the stairs trying to remember if he had missed or forgotten anything.

Outside, the rain had diminished to the faintest of drizzles. The air was damp and heavy, and the trees were still dripping wet. Just when he came near his parked vehicle, a cat, all white with a few black stripes, ran across. The whole thing – the rains, the running cat, and the damp air – reminded him of something, but he could not seem to remember what exactly it was. “Just like déjà vu,” he thought. Only yesterday he overheard someone speak of déjà vu, and here he was experiencing it today. “How words catch up with us!” he thought again, with a slight nod of his head, the way he did every time he carried a conversation with himself. But he needed to hurry now, he realized. He hopped on the vehicle, started the engine, and swiftly went out of the building compound, onto the main road, and became a part of the rushing, office-going, quotidian crowd.

Words

• Stationery, arguably, is one of the most mis-spelt words – it’s spelt stationary with alarming frequency. Which makes me think: Have you ever seen stationary ever being mis-spelt as stationery? I haven’t.

• It’s sometimes serendipity that introduces us to a new word. Like I found smorgasbord. I encountered this completely new word, just like that, twice, in two different and unconnected articles, in the span of a day. (By the way, smorgasbord means a wide variety or collection, usually of food.)

• On Sunday night while I was watching Sehar (a surprisingly taut film, I must add) I came across a hitherto unknown Hindi word varchasva (वर्चस्व). As explained in the film, it means something of an absolute authority that can neither be shared nor delegated – only earned. Interesting, isn’t it?

• Talking of film titles reminds me of Naseem, a film made by Saeed Akhtar Mirza, way back in 1995. I didn’t get a chance to see the film until recently, but I always remembered the title of the film because, I guess, I liked the tenderness the word conveyed. Naseem, in Urdu, means morning breeze.

• At work, the other day, I came across this new word – L10N. I had to scratch my head few times before I got to know that L10N is actually "localization" when you replace the alphabets between L and N and replace them with the count of absent alphabets. Ah, such new things I learn at work!

Wanderlust

Last Thursday, I embarked on a trip that eventually took me to thirteen different forts, numerous towns and villages, abandoned ruins of temples on hilltops and riverbanks, rock-cut caves hidden in the thick foliage of forests, carved inscriptions, giant fortifications, unknown tombs, water tanks, mausoleums and minarets. It continued for more than three days, across about 1400 kilometers, with little rest in between. So, at the end of it all, my mind is in a blur, and what remains are a few stray images – most of them for reasons I do not understand, yet.

• The first stop of the road trip came at a tiny little village, where we reached in the wee hours of the morning (in fact, it was more midnight than morning), and wanted to take a little nap in the veranda of a house that we barged in. It was a magnificently starry night and in between intermittent sleep I would stare heavenwards thinking of things that are usually inspired by such nights.

• Atop one of the forts where some of the old structures are still remaining, was a neat little arched pavilion standing on the edge, overlooking the endless spread of valley below. It was a place I would have wanted to sit for hours, with crumbling rocks for company and strong winds whistling about. But, alas, before I could have my fill, it was time to descend and move towards our next destination.

• In a godforsaken little place, the only eatery left open was (guess what!) a beer bar, the owner of which was kind enough to let us sleep on its terrace after dinner. So, there we slept again under a open sky, but this time in the company of a staggering pile of empty beer bottles.

• A series of unknown tombs – about 12 to 15 – lie on an elevated platform in the middle of the fort that we climb in. Most of the tombs had crumbled away – stone slabs had tumbled down and trees had grown up on them – and there’s nothing to tell us who lie buried under them or how they died. Going by the look, it seems they were significant enough to have got such big tombs erected for them and they must have died together. Probably, fighting in a battle, or struck by an epidemic.

• One of the pleasures of hiking to lesser known places is the surprise element. So, there was this place we went to that had an excellent Hemadpanthi temple with exquisite stone architecture. A steep climb to the hill beyond it revealed three rock-cut caves – one of them containing astonishing life-size statues of Mahavira in the dark cavernous hall. Standing outside the caves, I stood transfixed, looking over the valley that stretched beyond the horizon in the fading twilight, as the jungle came alive with calls of peacock, raucous noise of langurs, and myriad other birdsong.

• On the road, looking out of window of the car, can be a thrilling experience in itself – nondescript small villages pass by, the clamour of small towns give way to open fields, bunch of trees with inviting shades stand by the road, a church steeple peeks at a distance, occasionally a cemetery or a cremation ghat appear near a river, the clouds change shape and colour as afternoon rolls into evening, the moon comes up shining with pale ghostly light, and the sky fills up like a canvas with clusters of tiny glittering stars.

• On our last stop, we stand near two ruined temples near the bend of a river. The temples face each other and look much like twins. On their stone walls are curved statues of supple women playing musical instruments, men with garlands around their necks, horses, elephants, floral patterns – everything to the minutest possible detail. I sit on a slab of rock overlooking the tranquil river water flowing past in the fading twilight as the cool breeze soothes my travel-weary body.
  

Silly office humor

I am looking at a graph that shows the participation of certain teams in certain work-related activity. The timeline (in months) is on the horizontal (x) axis and the percentage of participation is on the vertical (y) axis. Ok, that much for background.

Now, out of the five teams, one team, I find, has jumped participation by a whooping 50% – from 20% to close to 70% – in just last one month. "Oh!" I exclaim and look for the name of the person who manages that team. As it turns out, the name of the manager is (indeed) Oh! Well, the exclamation sign is not part of the name, of course; I merely used it to show my surprise.