Two poems

Sea Lions 

Zoo Ticket 

Read here

 [Published by 1OverThe8 , 2015]

A poem

Flame of the Forest 

~ Read here ~

(Published by Typoetic.us 2015)

Nine Poems

Dachau 

Cave travel

Last hour at Marienberg

Driftwood 

~ Read here ~

Highgate Cemetary 

Conjugal visits 

Birds

Homecoming 

~ Read here ~

(published by Coldnoon Travel Poetics 2014,2015 )  

Venetian blinds

~ Read here ~

(published by Typoetic.us, 2014)

Kindly , no standing

Walk back, retrace, slide along, skip and crawl, 

tiptoe and side-hop through this shuffling city. 

There are many ways of moving in this city,

many ways of chasing, 

many ways of sulking and sleepwalking, 

and many ways of twirling through zebra crossings, 

in this city there are indeed many ways of walking, 

but kindly, 

no standing.

~ No standing in these places, walk on | Kindle Magazine ~

Noon Intrusion

We sit waiting.

Waiting for lunch to be served

It is that odd hour after noon

When rumbling stomachs

And siesta yearnings make

For a heady concoction.

I am strewn sideways

On the white plastic chair

Legs crossed up high

On the concrete seat in the verandah.

While she sits huddled

Like a bundle

In her red plastic throne.

Smiles flash on her chubby face

As thoughts of  heavenly

Fish curry

Light up small happy

Light bulbs strewn on her wrinkled lines.

Like a city balcony on a Diwali night.

As lazy as the sea breeze,

Pinki snoozes beside

The tulsi katte.

Her flurry tail

Twitching in an other-worldly dream

Lucky bitch...

Has her day everyday.

So it is still twenty minutes to lunch

And this clock seems to take too long.

Mild restlessness,

Little streams of thought,

Mix with a yellow haze

Of helpless surrender

To this intruder of the noon

Who creeps in every day,

Just before lunch time

And seeps around me, you , Pinki

Oozing warm lethargy.

A paralysis of events ,

Where nothing can be finished

nor started.

Just that suspended thought,

Saved for after the meal.

Grandmother , young lady

And the bitch ,

Three variables of an equation,

Strewn in the verandah,

Paused in happy hunger,

Waiting till time ticks again.

- Gokarna, kartik hunnime, 2009

remembering dear ajji, born in June, the only girl to cycle everyday to school from Tadadi to Torke, who married into Gokarna for love, and had 32 kinds of hibiscus in her garden

Stinking Lizaveta

stinking Lizaveta

standing in front of white, white Taj Mahal
stinking of marigolds and paper dry aboli

stinking Lizaveta

wandering through Amsterdam Centraal

sobbing and searching for her lost God, in blue mascara

stinking Lizaveta

sleeping outside Hotel Diana

dreaming of hot idlis and Bombay cutlet

stinking Lizaveta

singing of sunshine and seasons

amidst cold toilet tiles of an alley in NY

stinking Lizaveta

smelling her torn tar-stained clothes

that remind of the night, coal and her dead child’s eyes

stinking Lizaveta

stinking stinking stinking of this world 

and all its moist mouldy coziness.

~

//excerpt - chapter 'Stinking Lizaveta' from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov // 

“There was one special circumstance here which deeply shocked Gregory, having finally strengthened an unpleasant and revolting suspicion he had had for some time. Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya was an undersized girl ‘just under five feet’, as many pious old women of our town touchingly described her after her death. She was twenty and her healthy, broad, red face bore an expression of complete idiocy; she had a fixed and unpleasant look in her eyes, though it was meek enough. She walked about barefoot all her life, in winter as well as in summer, wearing only a hempen shift. Her very thick, almost black hair, curling like lamb’s wool, formed a kind of huge cap on her head. It was, besides, always matted with mud, and had leaves, splinters of wood, and shavings clinging to it, for she always slept on the ground and in the dirt. Her gather Ilya was a homeless sickly artisan, who had lost all his money and was perpetually drunk. He had been living for many years as a workman with some well-to-do tradesmen, also artisans of our town. Lizaveta’s mother had long been dead. Ilya , always ill and in a bad temper, used to beat Lizaveta unmercifully whenever she came home.

But she came home very rarely because she used to be fed by everybody in the town as a saintly fool. Ilya’s employers, Ilya himself, and many other compassionate people in the town, especially merchants and merchant’s wives, tried many times to clothe Lizaveta more decently, and towards winter always put a sheepskin and boots on her; but, although she let them put everything on her without protest, she used to so away, preferably to the cathedral porch, and take off everything she had been given – kerchief, skirt, sheepskin, or boots – and leave it and there and walk away barefoot and in her shift as before. It happened on one occasion that our new provincial governor, on his tour of inspection of our town , caught sight of Lizaveta and was deeply hurt in his tenderest feelings. Though he realised that she was a ‘saintly fool’, as indeed he was officially informed, he insisted on pointing out that for a young girl to wander about the street in nothing but her shift was a breach of the proprieties and that it must not happen again. But the governor departed, and Lizaveta was left as she was. At last her father died, and she became even dearer to all the pious people in our town as an orphan. Indeed, everyone seemed to like her and even the boys in the streets did not tease her or molest her, and the boys of our town, especially the schoolboys, are a mischievous lot. She would walk into strange houses and no one drove her out; on the contrary, everyone tried to be nice to her and give her a penny. If she were givne a penny, she would take it and at once drop it into some alms-box in a church or outside the prison. If she were given a roll or a bun in the market, she would go away and give it to the first child she came across, or else stop one of the richest ladies in our town and hand it to her; and the ladies were very pleased to accept it. She herself lived only on black bread and water. If she went into an expensive shop and sat down there, the proprietors took no notice of her, though there were costly goods and money lying about, for they knew that even if they put thousands of roubles before her and forgot all about it, she would not take a penny. [...]”

'The page is a touching'

The touch screen - the screen where I come in contact with the outside runs deep. The depth beyond the touch far exceeds an imagination of what an infinity can be. To imagine an infinite world all within your touch. Possibilities that exist only through the mind and implode silently. With each swipe, touch, tap and pinch.

‘The page is a touching, of my hand while it writes and your hands while they hold the book. This touch is infinitely indirect, deferred, but it continues as a slight, resistant, fine texture, the infinitesimal dust of a contact everywhere interrupted and pursued. In the end, here and now, your own gaze touches the same traces of characters as mine and you read me and I write you.

If I write I create sense-effects. I displace myself from bodies. Exscription passes through writing and so we have to write from a place, a body that we neither have nor are.’ 

- Jean Luc Nancy, Corpus

pencil outline of a detail from an Ukiyo-e woodblock print 

Dancing is writing, writing in space, making space within the opaque, hollowing it out so the inside and outside are no longer apart. The inside-outing of an intestinal desire. Akka Mahadevi wraps herself in silk rays from the sun, Krishna opens his mouth to show his mother an entire cosmos. The eye is the crack whose infinite darkness saves brightness from staining - a suction pump that deletes and erases all temporary files from Random Access Memories.

A sincere body, acting behaving, dancing and imitating everyday touches sincerely the ground it walks, tumbles and crawls upon. Writing about the dead owl outside our house and its passing makes the owl die two times over. Thriving on the ink and paper or the incandescent glow of the laptop screen and its flickering letters, the white feathers reappear on the grey belly of the owl, electrocuted by the electric pole by the street outside our house.  

A body is perhaps made by its documentary. It lives, it dies, it breathes when it has been written in the world of others. A lone human on the planet might as well be a plant or an insect or the wind?

‘But it was in vain that I lingered beside the hawthorns – breathing in their invisible and unchanging odour, trying to fix it in my mind, losing it, recapturing it, absorbing myself in the rhythm which disposed the flowers here and there with a youthful light-heartedness , and at intervals as unexpected as certain intervals in music – they went on offering the same charm in inexhaustible profusion but without letting me delve any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret.

I turned away from them for a moment so as to be able to return to them afresh.’ 

- Proust, Swann's Way , In Search of Lost Time  

a fetish for the manuscript

The handwriting has come a long way. The letter, the outline of letters and the sentences that churn out of the pen as a grandmother writes a letter to her granddaughter or an eccentric makes notes in his diary with his pencil. Here a small walk through manuscript lane. (in the order of mention)

Audrey Hepburn wrote back to Kubrick in round wobbly letters with what looks like a blunt fat pencil, just like her big round dreamy eyes, polite and stern. The writing permeates through a page along with the smudges of sweaty fingers flipping through them, ages after they have been written. That or the air conditioned humidity controlled glass casings of a gallery like Intensive Care Units maintain the lines on permanent ventilators, resuscitated in cycles, like Mira Schendel's graphite on rice paper, the ECG of these lines rising and falling like a restless summer ocean . Da Vinci found comfort in writing through the mirror while Dostoesvky often lost his sentences into solemn faces of his heroes. And as Vladimir Nabokov had just finished colouring the butterfly from his garden, it flew and planted itself on the window sill of a  far away Bengali mansion as as Rabindranath Tagore allowed his pen to consume his page and his words completely.

[all images sourced from google]

# interesting link - Digitised manuscripts of the British Library

Deposing the listener

'Are you speaking to me?' asks a frightened youngster to the middle-aged man sitting across her in the tube-train in London. He has been looking in her direction for fifteen minutes now, but not at her. She frowns and hides behind the novel in her hand. He continues his speak. He is speaking animatedly of colonial imports and exports from Jakarta, Indonesia and trade sea routes unacknowledged by historians of the imperial colonies. This man would be just another stranger going to work this ordinary morning, newspaper in hand if it weren't for this little detail. - that he is speaking to no-one in particular with devoted attention. The row of commuters sitting along him and opposite him become increasingly edgy and shifty from behind their book shields and tabloid shields. He would go on even when the train empties at the next station and I walk away feeling disturbed and unsettled by this incident. Consensus would conclude that such behaviour is aberrant. He must obviously be insane. This man was having a 'conversation' with the entire imagined people in the train coach, equally and unconditionally - a conversation where himself was the only person he was talking with yet is his thoughts were on offer to the 'all' that he was not speaking to. It makes me think of expressions of soliloquys and the vulnerable face of human expression that it brings to the fore. The soliloquy is often used as a theatrical technique to give the audience insight into the actor's thoughts while not being heard by the characters on stage. Imagine this theatrical trope trickling out of the stage and into everyday life where the listener is deposed and dispositioned.

The word 'Selfie' was declared the word of the year 2013 by Oxford dictionary. Self-timed photographs and selfies in the digital age seem be non-instituionalised familial descendants of the self portraits of artists we are so familiar with, be it Van Gogh or Amrita Shergill or Pushpamala N in present times. Selfies also speak with the similar unconditional command of the soliloquy. You don't wait for an audience - you are your own audience within your urgent condition.

Soliloquists.
Images from left to right: Screenshots from Autumn Sonata(1978)  Liv Ullman , Ingrid Berman., Persona (1966) Liv Ullman, Portrait -  Frida Kahlo
[Late Latin sōliloquium= Latin sōl(us) only, sole + loqu(ī) to speak]

Ingmar Bergman in his films Autumn Sonata(1978) and Persona(1966), makes his woman characters (brilliantly played by Liv Ullman, Bibi Anderson and Ingrid Bergman) engage in long, tumultuous soliloquies before the camera. The camera becomes the petrified spectator, as we watch and listen to the characters speak their most internal thoughts aloud naturally and circumstantially. Through the camera we witness them speak to no-one in particular yet to every-one. There is freedom from the tyranny of reciprocity in the narrative solely driven by unleashed moments of speaking to the void. Characters bathe in their own aura, after the ebb of hysterical deliriums, mostly from stubborn minds. ( The words 'aural' and 'aura' are in this matter not so far from each other. The soliloquy exists on that fine line that separates the etymology of the two words i.e a perception by listening in the former and a perception possible without listening in the latter.)

The listener exists in her absence

Confronted by a person who doesn't care if you existed as their audience but at the same time whose being entirely depended on it, the listener is put into the most precarious of positions. We are taunted, dismissed and captivated. We exist precisely through our absence in the speaker's voice. In this moment of nakedness, no pretension, no protocol, no courtesy defends us from them - the soliloquists. Persona embodies this stubborn mind's wrath - when one chooses to speak/ not/ listen/ not/ talk/ not/ exist/ not/ react/ not/ remember/ not/ forget/ not/ record.

Woody Allen's latest film Blue Jasmine(2013) poignantly and eerily hinges on the image of Jasmine speaking to herself in delirious states. Succumbing to a traumatic past, she is entangled in a mental time warp, a kind of seizure ( allegorically in sync with the economic seizure of many countries at present ) that rewinds, forwards and tries to change the course of events in the past mentally but is ultimately condemned to exist within a looped soliloquy. The stranger sitting on the park bench next to Jasmine silently gets up and walks away as the camera edges away too, leaving Jasmine staring infinitely across and beyond the camera.

~

The silently clicked self-photograph is one small channel to this internal ebb - an acknowledgement of those modestly immodest times when you realize that 'this' right now, right here needs to be inscribed. You get over the inhibition of judgemental eyes and set your camera on a timer, find a suitably high ledge to place it on, and run back to position yourself within your inscription. The narrative is internalised. The listener is successfully made dispensable in the internal moment and pushed out into the every-one/no-one sphere, which is often social media - facebook/ twitter/ blog. This act gains strength in its willingness to reveal a weak moment in an increasingly singular world. Personal records get made by the second by this accumulative uploading of anonymous faces inscribed within their memorable moments. A vast tableau vivant emerges of rather vulnerable and helpless individuals battling their soliloquies where internal distances further away as physical distances collapse. 

'Are you listening to me?' 

Canon Self-timer - 10 seconds. Clicked at 3.17pm on Sunday, 24.11.13.
Time to resume position - 6 seconds. Time to think - 4 seconds.
 [interiors] London, U.K 

PS: 'I dispose of you by being intimate and impersonal[..]' - Gertrude Stein

       #interesting read - Bruce Andrews - Reading Language , reading Gertrude Stein 

Work of sight

Jean Luc Godard in Les plages d'Agnes- as seen through Agnes Varda's eyes, by me

Agnes Varda reminisces how Godard gave her the rare privilege of letting her see him without his famed sunglasses. 

"I loved his beautiful eyes and his cinema". 

This image is a special moment for me as I look at a pair of eyes that I have only mostly seen through or shared a vision with. Being confronted with the eyes of the seeker whose vision you have comfortably shared, through his camera is almost like coming face to face with an alter-reflection , a moment of suspense undone in a film noir.

Godard in this image may as well not be looking, or looking at someplace else, beyond and far behind me. The distant gaze is both projected outside of him and back into his sight . Its like a mirror that reflects the distance it sees. The dark pupils are opaque and yet piercing, infinite and zero at the same time. Staring into the zero or 'shunya' (more complex Sanskrit translation for the 'nought') is at the same time gazing into the infinite, constantly battling the limits of a horizon and wanting to see more.

L'inconnue de la Seine ( 1880's)

The Unknown woman of the Seine , L'inconnue de la Seine , whose death mask became an inspiration for many literary works and speculations is also an image of a woman who could be seeing into the distance, despite her death; a state of forced blindness despite sight where the slightly bulging pupils behind the eyelids perhaps are an indication of the eyes open even when they are closed.

मरने के बाद भी आँखें  खुली रहीं , आदत  जो पड़ गयी  थीं तेरे इंतज़ार की  

 Faiz Ahmed Faiz 

French writer, literary theorist Maurice Blanchot in his Thomas the Obscure, 1941, speaks fantastically of this dichotomous sight

"It was night itself. Images which constituted its darkness inundated him. He saw nothing, and far from being distressed, he made this absence of vision the culmination of his sight. Useless for seeing, his eye tool on extraordinary proportions, developed beyond measure, and stretching out on the horizon, let the night penetrate its centre in order to receive the day from it. And so, through this void, it was sight and the object of sight which mingled together. Not only did this eye which saw nothing apprehend something, it apprehended the cause of its vision. It saw as object that which prevented it from seeing. Its own glance entered into it as an image, just when this glance seemed the death of all image."

The blinding turmoil of the eye seeing into absolute darkness is an exhilarating moment- one of hitting the opaque surface beyond comfortable reach; of encountering a resistant world of images refusing to reveal itself as anything else but itself. The pendulum keeps oscillating.

#interesting read - Merleau Ponty on The Primacy of Perception   

Beginnings

The potential of beginnings is on my mind.

A dispersal of points. A setting forth.  A series of beginnings and no ends- perhaps a most precarious method of functioning today.  False alarms, panic starts, carburators that refuse to ignite but are in the continuous labour of combustion. Bollywood films with only first halves ( which would spell paradise for the scriptwriter!)

In one of Edward Said’s earlier books, Beginnings: Intentions and methods, he suggested that the literary form of the novel was a step towards a manner of institutionalization [my reading] of the story teller. The novel involves a pre-disposition - the writer who consciously chooses a method of expansion to tell a story. Either the story begins with an intention of being a long one or is an episode that promises to churn more. Either way, a potential is realised in the ‘beginning’ and harnessed further. What of the storyteller who is not keen to know the end, or the one who has foreseen the end too soon and would rather not execute this foresight?

We are left with a folder full of empty word files, others with just two lines or paragraphs, each carrying immense possibilities and a writer who is content in creating these moments of possibility in the unwritten and eventually never writes. 

"A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order."

Jean-Luc Godard

Ouroboros

The Mobius Strip

I came across this quote as a status update on Facebook a few days ago - "Those who are wise lament neither for the living nor the dead. For death is certain to one who is born; to one who is dead, birth is certain; therefore, thou shalt not grieve for what is unavoidable." These images of the cyclical are all too familiar. What begins ends, what ends, begins. But what if nothing ends and it is completely vital to shift gears and begin elsewhere just to save yourself from one kind of endlessness and begin another. A violent proposition of constantly spiralling out. An asceticism that pushes towards discomfort and constantly escapes the comfort of its routine.

~

The archaeological site is a site of projected possibilities into both the future and the past. An end point  and a beginning at once, waiting, pausing and pushing the moment of the action just a few more centuries away. Like Apu who decides to miss his train and stay at home one extra day.[Aparajito (1956) Dir: Satyajit Ray]

"Imagining oneself as a child is like running backwards. Imagining oneself ancient is funny, like a dirty joke." 

Agnes Varda 

 ~

The image below is a frame from Agnes Varda’s film Les plages d'Agnes (the Beaches of Agnes) (2008). 

For a long time I struggled with this image that has ever since been my obsession. I see in my imagination, the trapeze artist swaying from one trapeze to another, tossing into the sky further and further until one fine day managing to hook onto it with an umbrella and hang in suspension until further notice. The umbrella has a pencil point with which the trapeze artist can write on the sky, draw tails and signatures of acrobat-kin. But the imagination was in a spasm of trying to actualize an impossible image. The sky and the universe as being an ever expanding material that refused to show itself. 

Yesterday , while wandering in the Science museum in London, I found this. 

The caption reads as follows:
Glass Sphere
This rare example of a celestial sphere belonged to Stephen Demainbray, a lecturer whose collection becae amalgamated with the royal collection. It was designed by Robert Long in 1742. The Instrument was used to demonstrate both the real and the apparent motion of the heavens by turning either the Earth globe or the glass globe. The glass globe is engraved with the major constellations.

Here was an image of the world and its sky- with a beginning, with a circumference. The glass globe as the sky helped me stand outside of it. Made it possible for me to imagine my trapeze artist finally having a surface to fall into. Skyfall was within reach.  

The moment of labour is the one suspened in between the two bars - mid–air when she turns and begins her next journey to the other trapeze, without a safety net below her. It is the work of a beginning. A moment of courage that begins by the momentum accrued by her self set in motion by the trapeze pushed by the friend on the other side, her acrobat-kin.

Beginning now.  

Apichatpong's Tropical Pulse

I discovered Apichatpong Weerasethakul in my global art cinema class taught by Dr. Mark Betz. We were shown his film , ‘Syndromes and a century’ and were left quite disoriented at the end of the film.  After then, having seen Tropical Malady and Mysterious object at noon , it is only but evident that this filmmaker has his emotional quotient very deeply rooted with his people in Thailand. Apichatpong’s narratives seem to have the lightness of a grasshopper, effortlessly moving from one figment to another, yet , binding all these figments in a close network of emotional  ties, which weave the film into a overwhelming mood piece.

While watching his recent short , Ashes, shot using the Lomokino , which premiered at Cannes this year, the most eloquent aspect of the film that struck me was his keen ear to the sounds of memory. The visual aesthetic of the flashy overexposed film lends itself the hazy misty air of transformative contingent recollections. The dog  on leash, the ambitious pig in the sty,  the sounds of birds in the distance, of rustling palm leaves on a breezy coastal afternoon, of steaming rice in the kitchen , and a stroll in the evening, all these little details are intuitively captured. The film gradually shifts into craftwork when the filmmaker overlays the same ‘home’ footage with digitized aberrational sounds that echo a certain kind of appropriated pulse of technology. Ashes , performs a simple act of placing a finger on your wrist to place your pulse.  

A similar pulse ran through his first film, Mysterious Object at Noon, which uses both enacted and documentary style of filmmaking , to present a collage of deeply personal narratives that evolve around myths and folklores of Thailand, and emerge out of a vernacular sensibility . There is a sense of nostalgia in every fragment , a revocation of intimacy and helplessness. The mise en scene has touches of tactile everyday domesticity. The film which explores a narrative based on the game of spontaneous story building , which the surrealists indulged in, therefore , opens up the margins of the film. The film makes room to allow moments of collapse of the control of the camera. The pace of the film is as if the whole two hours of viewing were drowned into a time warp bubble, the heart beats of the audience seem to race beyond the pulse of the filmic experience.      

The story of a mysterious object which turns into a  mysterious boy who is said to have killed his teacher , gains life, like a local myth, through its renewal and retelling through various people . It turns into a seed to develop different modes of performing the story , while at the same time allowing for spontaneous filmic siestas . The element of magic , of course, is the tiger , which enters the plot towards the end,  into the hitherto human story , which pushes the realm of the narrative into becoming a fairy tale, the storytellers being curious and inventive school kids. The tiger finds again an important part to play in his ‘Tropical Malady ‘, again resorting to a dispersed thread of narration of folklore. In ‘Syndromes and a century’, the vast slow camera pan around the different urban and pastoral locations , and elongated time lapses generously given for the spaces themselves to emote and take forward the film’s mood, reflect a keen sensitivity towards spatial emotive topographies , that perhaps could have come from Apichatpong’s primary training as an architect prior to his education in fine arts and films.

His regular video art pieces and shorts, which have been produced religiously over the years , alongside his long features , seem to help keep agile his film craft and inventive  fervor. Apichatpong’s cinema seems to resonate with a certain wisdom . A wisdom which is nurtured by the international fraternity and as apparent by the widespread press coverage, is celebrated as a unique coming together of a global and a regional sensibility in the filmmaker.   

Daily visitor

He comes and

sits on that

little nervous tree

with no roots.

Last summer

the tree would bear

fragile pink

paper flowers.

now it seems bored.

He has little

humourous wings that dance

as he croons

deep and adamant.

The firing hearth next door

wafts up an endearing smoke,

from a distant memory

of a personal place.

His uncertain neck

pulsates to the beat

of the hapless city

around it,

Twisting and turning

like a restless baby's wrist.

The fresh henna on her hand

smells a deep orange,

finds voice in him,

strikes roots in the tree.

In an anchored hour of

sunseived shade

the tree shivers

in the warm

afternoon breeze. 

Evening Walk

Evening sands, billowing in the breeze, were creating a little storm in between her toes. It was still a long way till dusk set in, and she had walked long, almost frantically, trying to shake off the stray birds of thought that kept nestling in her mind. Walking was an automatic intuition.

So she set forth on her way back, her blue cloth bag on her shoulder still swinging with little crumbs of sand grains and broken bangles. She seemed oblivious to the sun that was setting behind her. She was looking forward to meeting a new friend whom she hoped to run into , on the main beach. Having made no rendezvous promises or appointments, they had allowed themselves a small door to a serendipitous thrill .

Their first encounter had been like an old petal found in the yellowing pages of a favorite unread novel. Without a beginning, without an end, she had chanced out of humming voices and salt water reveries, just like a fading fragrant petal emerging from floating words and images of the book. As the familiar stranger had exchanged formal greetings and set forth on her way, the wide eyed five year old had called out her name from behind her back, ran up to her and grasped her hand with absolute authority, and taken her to the sea. This new curiously towering ‘Akka’ was her license to play with the waves, and she was not going to let go of her so soon. And so, the next day, with excited anticipation, Akka’s long beach walks had promises of turning eventful.

The waves seemed to have more white foam that day.As the sun set far behind her, wallowing in neglect , Akka spotted her little ball of fire in a distance. There she was, running in circles around her father. He , was sitting with a hunch , complacently distant in thought from this little satellite that was taking its roundoos, almost like a ritual. Her little palms clenched tight, arms outstretched she seemed like she was on her own roller coaster ride in neverland.

On that day, Prathama was wearing blue cotton shorts and a white smugly fitting blouse with a playboy bunny in pink glitter on her chest. She was careful not to venture too near the water. She harboured an illicit attraction towards the waves, which she was not allowed to tread into alone. It was a love hate relationship with the sea. She could curse it, embrace it, caress it, kick it, throw imaginary stones at it, play hide and seek with it, and it would never let her down. It would always come back.

‘ You are late! You don’t keep up your promises!’ , she complained as she ran towards Akka , who she saw approaching in the distance.

Akka bent down and Prathama clung to her red checked shirt with moist sandy salty hands.

‘ I’m going to walk till that end of the beach’, said Akka, pointing towards the hillock at the end.

‘ Go and come back quickly!’ , grimaced Prathama , as she ran back to circling her appa. Midway , however , she had a change of plan , and ran back behind Akka, and tugging at her shirt, said ‘ I’ll also come with you.’

So the two of them set off to take a walk right up to Ramateertha. Prathama dint know where she was going . She had just wholeheartedly surrendered to this two day old stranger. However, distances had conspired to deceive the five year old.

Amidst fellow kids, building sand hills , and turning into objects of Prathama’s curious envious glances, and past the town’s housewives, with sarees tucked up at the waist, who had come for the daily evening walks , two trails of footsteps made their way. It is ‘walking ’ , not ‘walk’ corrected Prathama. She seemed to be present forever in the present continuous.

It had been two weeks. Whispers were making rounds of the little temple town. Mabla was nowhere to be seen; not hanging around the regular Maitri juice centre with his friends in the evenings nor at the late night arom boards games at Sanna bele Mabu’s place. Mabla’s gregarious laughter that usually resounded in the town every time he passed Rathabeedhi on his noisy motorbike, had suddenly fallen silent. The reporter of the town surmised the turn of face as a result of cynicism. ‘Mabla has turned cynical’, he said to peers. So it was on everybody’s lips ; of fellow shopkeepers and grocery store owners, of the retired schoolteacher who spent every afternoon sitting on his front porch katte , fanning himself with a Chinese fan that an odd beach hopper left behind as a token of appreciation for being given legible directions to Om beach, and of the Rajasthani boy who spoke impeccable kannada and sold his disposable beachwear for no less than double the market price. ‘Mabla has become cynical , maraithi. He doesn’t talk to us anymore’. ‘Did something happen? Did some friend betray him? Is he hiding something from us?’

A town would not remain silent , if one of its own goes silent. Many phone conversations featured the recent face-turn of Mabla. ‘ You remember Mabla? The loud large hearted man with the cute little daughter ? I don’t know what has happened to him, he has turned cynical since last week!’

What the word ‘cynical’ really meant did not really matter to the rumour hoppers. Its sounded mysterious and that sufficed.

Along the shore, the two dotted figures made their way . Prathama and her Akka were now somewhere past the main beach, as the rock divided the shore into a smaller lesser inhabited beach, sanna bele . The little boys with their sand castles were left behind. The saree clad walking women had far drifted away in the opposite direction , almost in a gleeful joy of disappearing into the horizon , if only temporarily , before they get back into their domestic dens.

The waves were turning grey. The evening sun , quite without warning had slipped out of the frame and let the clouds take over a magnetic magenta sky. Evenings were confusing by the beachside. One moment, it would be a feisty celebration of light in the sky and the faces of the town would turn golden and crisp with a sepia aura .The next moment, the town was an abandoned child , reveling in the momentary nostalgia of the feast they just witnessed, and trying hard to remain cheerful in it , even as the sea turned grey and black almost helplessly.

It was past sundown and the grey threathened Prathama. Suddenly , she looked up and saw no one around her. Who was this tall girl , she had come along with? She dint know her. Where was her appa? Where was the town, the noise , the children? She looked down at her feet, and her tiny chappals suddenly started to feel like they were shrinking. She saw Akka , now, pointing towards a rocky shortcut that led to the path to Ramateerth, which was where they were headed. But something felt fishy. It seemed like she had been walking all day , and yet, Akka was saying they had some more distance to go! How could that be possible?

And slowly almost without her knowledge, she started whining .First mildly and then emphatically. She realized she had to act, she must speak out, that she couldn’t be taken for a ride , by her strange tall friend. The unfamiliarity started caving in on her. The beach looked monstrous. She stopped dead in her track. She wouldn’t walk anymore. She just stopped and sat down in her place, hoping her resistance would be heeded.

Akka, was now , helplessly confused. She had no choice but to have to go to the end point as she had to run an errand for her grandmother. So , now with her little bundle of gravity that had planted herself to the ground, she tried negotiating. ‘Just a little bit more and Il get you an ice cream’ , ‘Just a little more and we’ll soon see your appa’ , and so she bent down and picked up Prathama , who was now belligerent . She tried to wriggle her way out of her grasp but Akka was holding on firmly. And then in a fit of sheer helplessness, she caught hold of the elastic necklace that Akka was wearing, which at the moment looked magnified with its round green and brown beads, and slapped it down on the road. Akka was under attack , quiet out of the blue, an unexpected turn of mood she had found herself in. Picking up her necklace from the ground, they lumbered their way up the temple.

At the gate , Prathama refused to budge yet again. In a fit of desperation, Akka took the absurdly irresponsible decision of leaving Prathama behind at the entrance alone, as she ran up to the waterfount to fill her bottle with mineral water for her grandma ; all the while the sound of Prathama’s loud wailing ‘Appa, Appa, Appa’ following her in the background.

The nightmare was only getting worse by the minute for Prathama. So as much as she had hoped her necklace wrenching act would gain her some attention, to her horror , she now found herself, all alone on the steps of Ramateertha , as she saw her only hopeful savior run away from her! She could only wail louder. It felt like a moment of disconnect from the entire time line of the sleepy town. Although just for a couple of minutes ( but minutes can turn into eternities) , this little girl was synced out of her time, and placed in the timeless frame of an evening made of lonely strangers, grey and passionless. Like a sticky green leaf lying incoherently on a corrugated tin roof, Prathama quivered as the chilly evening sea breeze made the ribbons in her pony tails dance.

There was a little wound on her elbow, from her recent fall in her recently concreted courtyard. Raising her little stubby fingers to her face to wipe out her eyes , tears and kohl made a puzzling pattern with the lines on her palm. The four minutes , that Prathama spent, on the steps of Ramateertha , were like a lost piece of film spliced with a new film reel.

Akka was back; the little lone girl hadn’t been abandoned after all, there was a glimmer through the grey.

Lifting up her little screaming bundle , Akka now, made her way as quickly as she could , down the steps and back on the beach, now in a mad rush to get the daughter back with her separated father. Prathama was getting heavier by the step and the slender frame of Akka was exerting all its reserve of energy to carry this bundle back to its rightful people.

As they finally neared the main beach , it was dark. The faces had turned fuzzy. Here and there , were groups of townspeople extending their last moments on the beach, before they headed back in to their sultry deep homes. Peering keenly across the people sitting there, Mabla was nowhere to be found. Prathama had cried her throat hoarse, ‘Appa, appa’ and refused to walk any further. She stayed put like a furious sage. She had been deceived by the uncanny ways of this suddenly formidable world.

Looking around for help, Akka recognized the familiar face of the retired postmaster who was sitting with his friends. He gave her an inquisitive look ,sympathetic at her plight. Akka asked him if he had seen Mabla anywhere and he replied saying maybe he was sitting a little further away , he hadn’t seen him .Trying hard to recall where exactly, they had left the morose stooping father back on the beach, Akka tried hard to figure out from amongst the blurring silhouettes seated in the shrouded evening , on the shore. The man was nowhere in the blurred strokes of that evening.

The little girl’s throat had gone soar, as her tears now started mixing with the rising tide and turning the sea a little more salty. Her fingernails dug into the sand, the black silicon from underneath, etching its way out through the gaps in between her fingers and making its way up to her eyes in place of her washed out kohl as another pair of eyes scanned the horizon , searching in vain for a figure in waiting ,and finally resting on a rising tide , that receded with a tiny chappal floating away into the dark distant.

***

across the room

2 am

slumber trucks moan

white wash sprinkles

and lands on me like

lazy snowflakes

on the next bed

sleeps a girl

she came to me

two weeks ago.

her gentle breathing

is tense

she could be dreaming

perhaps

but sitting across the room

at 2 am

i am searching for a way

to find out.

Finger prints and soggy letters

It feels surreal that time can be compacted through mental space despite physical distances. You wake up in Delhi and go to bed in Mumbai. Its been a year, it feels like ages, yet it feels like just yesterday , that I was here. The city seems to have turned timeless, like a constant frame through which people come and go like ants. The heart of Mumbai lies in the contrived domestic space which becomes the starting point for extrusions and explosions , that make the outside of the city the site of such an infusion of energy.

The Gateway lies desolate. It doesn’t hog the light it deserves. Somehow, it seems like its grown aged and no longer interested in bearing mast for its city. The swarms of middle class Sunday crowd seem parasitic to the place. Each little world, a closed decadent cuccoon, trapped within the boundaries of the camera lens, which seems to be the sole witness and jury to the fact of their existence.They try to break free by riding on silver painted neon lit horse carriages. Try to escape the ground that they are so wary of, yet, the ride is momentary in its effect. The horses always bring them back to the same point where they started.

She gets lost in the city. Her feet always need to move. Never on a standstill, they are automatically drawn towards the sea. Marine drive is Mumbai’s threshold into dreamspace. It marks an edge to a human constrained living and an extended threshold into the infinite sea beyond. It is the stage where the city distances itself from you and offers itself for your insatiate gaze. The urban proscenium sells the city to its customers who come willingly to be hypnotized by this edge.

Shards of memory are strewn all over the city like little horcruxes. Figments of images, clinging onto crumbling concrete. The cellotaped apartments , seem to have lost the will to renew. The concrete dark and old , weeps and cries all over the suburbs. The patched up cracks on the dilapidated apartments grow like algae, like ugly magnifications of the dark thorns tucked within the minds of the domestic beings within.

I find myself taller, larger. The city is a child, looking up at me , tugging at the hem of my shirt,leaving behind grimy finger prints and soggy letters.

Mumbai, August 2011

Remembering My dearest Ajju

( I am reposting this writeup i had written two years ago , having added a few more memories to the picture. Happy Birthday to my dearest Ajju ) That afternoon comes back to me , when I went and sat by him on his bed and had a nap in his lap as his soft wrinkled hands patted my head. That vacation , I had got my walkman player, and Ajju’s favourite Marathi natya sangeeth cassettes, which he used to listen to , from earphones. Every time, the earphone fell out of an ear, he used to call out, ‘Gonti!..” and I used to run to him and plug him back into his musical world. This was the first vacation I was spending in Gokarna alone. Having waved goodbye to papa , who left me with dear little grandma and grandpa, tears streamed down my eyes, as we sat in the verandah and darkness fell. Ajju would love listening to bhajans I sang. My voice choked as I sang ‘dehi dehi sharade, gnyaanam dehi sarvade’, but soon it was fine, and I no longer felt frightened. Except now and then, when I came across a dark threatening corner or lightless room in the vast house, especially after sunset. I had never felt happier to greet the morning and the sun, as I did then.

It was the last vacation I could spend with Ajju, because, on the November 14^th early at two in the morning, we all had to say goodbye to Ajju. That year we (the family) stayed back after the funeral ceremonies , during karthik poornima. And we went to the Deepotsava that happens every year in the Kotiteertha, the sacred tank.

It was magical as hundreds of lamps reflected in the water along with a bright moon who seemed lost in all the celebration, and fireworks lit up the sky effusive with joy. It seemed a fitting goodbye to our dear grandpa. Last week, when I was back in Gokarna on my usual visit, I stayed back an extra day hoping to catch the Deepotsava on karthik poornima. But it is never like that first time, is it? However hard one tries to re-live past moments, it is never the same. Each time is a new time.

When I was there this time , I dug into the shelf in the study, which was full of books ( as is any shelf in our house) ; but this one almirah had a special taboo attached to it. Once long ago, I had ventured to open this very cupboard, and to my horror, there a was a tiny rat inside which ran right up my arm and jumping off my shoulder, scurried away victoriously! I was in a state of hysteria , as I ran and locked myself in my room and refused to come out , till the maid came and consoled me saying that she had taken care of it and it was safe to come out now. Later , the poor creature was a subject of my sympathy and I even wrote a small verse on it.

So, well, after mustering courage , I opened it this time . Happy to see no moving tails or black beings inside. I found a whole range of books on culture, Leninism, Marxism, and the likes, which were from the local library. And each of them had markings in pencil , made by Ajju when he found certain passages or points which were notable. And after long I felt I was in touch with him. I was reading the same passages, that he had read many years ago, and wondering what thoughts must have arisen in his mind then. The very awareness of this idea gave me an immense sense of peace. The signs one leaves behind, signs that remind us of a healthy living thinking mind, signs that give you solace when you need it, signs that give hope when you are in despair. Finding those books, inspired a new zeal , a new feeling of awareness and a bright feeling of joy at the very prospect of discovering things that are waiting to be .

One summer vacation , we had a digital camcorder with us. So I decided to record an interview with Ajju. I was in the sixth grade, a shy girl who wouldn’t talk. So , my father prompted me . I reluctantly asked . The question was ‘Do you still think there is no God?’ and I vaguely remember him giving an amused smile. I was amused at the unlikely moment , as these words tumbled out of my mouth, although fed by my father; perhaps, his curiosity found a voice in me. For me, then, Ajju came closest to the divine. And with his presence, there was always a ubiquitous sense of spiritual stability. He would sit out there on his easy chair, in the verandah and absorb us into him. More than a few times, with us children playing cricket in the courtyard, hitting bouncers now and then, he sportingly absorbed and ducked away tennis balls, too , which would bounce across his easy chair!

I hear him tapping my head with his tender frail hands , slender long fingers, saying ‘gontipor toh’ ( ‘that’s my little gonti’) , and tapping on the harmonium keys with nonchalant confidence. I hear his stories in his grainy voice. Every afternoon, I would sit adamantly in front of him , sinking into one of the easy chairs , my legs and hands dangling out like crab limbs, and waiting for him to start. And he would start, ‘Once upon a time , there was a king ( a raaaya )..’ ; always a raaya , with the occasional fisherman or farmer He was like a perennial fountain of stories for me. From him , I knew why the sea was salty, because a princess in some faraway castle had cried her heart out and her tears had turned into the ocean.

He would tell me to concentrate only on the subjects I like in school, saying the rest will take care of themselves. Once, he had told me how minds are like good conductors and bad conductors, some minds take time to grasp knowledge, but have a great capacity to retain once learnt, while some others grasp quickly but let go of the knowledge as quickly. And that had put me into a very troubled state of dilemma , later that day , as to which kind I belonged to.

I have memories of him walking up and down our front yard , in our old house , which still had its katanjan ( wooden trellises) and the tiled roof that let into the mysteriously dark kitchen a snatch of a morning ray through a glazed gap. Up and down the frontyard smelling of freshly shining cowdung, he walked, his walking stick, making a graceful gate of tip tap , in tune with his feet. This was when he no longer went out to the beach to take his legendary walking trail all the way up to Rudrapaada. I have heard from people, he would walk for phenomenal distances; he would walk everywhere, and that he would walk and read a book in his hand at the same time! I like to think that I’ve got the taste of walking and reading from him.

Another random summer memory is when we had just reached Gokarna after a long bus journey from Mumbai( since we lived there then). My brother and me were very small. Before entering the house, we spotted Pashupathi, the neighbourhood boy, who was few years elder to my brother and his good friend, sitting on the katte next door. Excitedly , my brother waved and greeted him. Instead, Pashupathi just turned his back to us and went into his house. That perplexed me and my brother. Like an offended pampered child, I went and told this to Ajju. Instead of consoling me, he asked me to be patient, and give the boy some time to come around. We had come from the city, and maybe he felt left out seeing us. I hadn’t quite understood, why, Ajju had taken his side then. Now looking back, I see. Every time, we ‘city kids’ , hopped in for vacationing, there would be a phase of diffidence that Pashupathi, would be overcome with , perhaps arising from the fact that he lived in a small town. And then, after a few days, once he sensed that nothing had changed, and we were all still the same, he would get back to playing with us like usual. I feel grateful that Ajju took his side, that day. Pashupathi has grown up now, and comes everyday to our house to read the morning newspaper and now and then teach my grandma how to press the numbers in her mobile phone.

All the letters he wrote to us, me and my brother, are safe with me . Spontaneous limericks on us and advise on how we should read a lot , learn music, not fight, study well, and not worry much about subjects I dint like. In every letter, he never failed to say a little sorry for his handwriting, which he considered illegible. His handwriting in fact was like a mysterious codec to me , evolving in its own speed and design to become a script that could be read by a select few. Now I see my father’s writing follows the same trend. The explanation he gives is that the mind thinks faster than the hand’s capacity to catch up.

I have known my grandfather as a grand daughter , but there is also the need to know him completely through his mind, through his ideas, through his writings. He seems an ocean. I am yet to learn to swim so I could delve into it. Remembering and missing my dearest Ajju , as he completes a hundred years of multitude.