Oh Scarlett Oh Hara!

The name is not just a name, it is a symbol. 'Oh scarlet oh hara !' Margaret Mitchell was not playing around the weak hearted when she envisioned and gave life to this character that has ever since been immortalized by a staggeringly vivid performance by Vivien Leigh , the legendary British actress. The book of course, is the classic tale of a civilization ‘Gone With the Wind’ with Scarlett O’Hara at the centre of it all, the eye of the whirlpool in which she sucks in all people who ever matter to her and who eventually succumb to her ubiquity.

Vivien Leigh proved as the only person who could have take on this character so perfectly, and her own persona has beyond doubt added to the screen image of this masterpiece. Quite contrary to the defeatist little coy dancer, Myra, that Vivien plays in Waterloo Bridge, this remarkable character by the name of Scarlett O Hara is a conceited optimist, a go – getter who has so much energy and life that no room would be unaffected in her presence. She exudes herself into all surrounding things and quite without her knowledge, all things bend towards her, just like a field of sunflowers towards the sun. And just when one starts to think she could be the most remarkable person, Margaret Mitchell goes on to ruin every little reputation that could form in our minds by making her such a faulty and marred character, full of follies, fury and conceit, that she edges on being an object of hatred. Here is a selfish robust girl who cares about no-one but herself, many a times quite unknowingly. We watch with helplessness as she steers her life ruinously and recklessly all for someone, she has so naively talked herself into loving; the unattainable and married Ashley Wilkes. It doesn’t come as a surprise that every man she lays her eyes upon, is undoubtedly affected and appears as a helpless weakling before her.

Scarlett’s never say die spirit, takes her through the roughest times as we see a childish little schoolgirl transforming into a hard hearted, strong, and a ruthlessly matter-of-fact lady. She survives her war, hunger, and public detest. And she has no one but herself to give all the credit for it. It is a cruel portrayal the survival of the fittest, and fitting enough she turns into the predator and not the prey. From dancing in public as a widow, to acting as a midwife in times of riots, to plowing her own fields and doing business with the enemies to raise money, to riding her own horse carriage when it was considered unacceptable for ladies to even ride alone in public, there is nothing that she does not do to keep the promise she made to herself at during the hardest time of her life, ‘ that she would never go hungry again’.

Of course the whole world would topple on one side with such a strong unchecked force. So along comes Rhett Butler, the anti-hero, the deserter who is as conceited , as selfish and as hot blooded as Scarlett, but with more years behind him and with shrewd wisdom that is good enough to check Scarlet’s rampage. Only a diamond cuts a diamond; “sirf loha lohe ko kaat saktha hai”, as Thakur says in the Bollywood classic, Sholay. So Butler is the unlikely antimatter to our O’Hara matter. It is a welcome surprise that we are not in for any predictable romance blooming between them, but a peculiar love hate bond, which leaves each of them bitterer than the last.

Yet, after three marriages and a child, she is still a robust child, who wants to get back her 18” waist. She says she was never meant to be the marrying kind. She naively confesses that she can frankly love nobody else but herself. One could only affectionately laugh at this little child’s admission of her weakness and say ‘my poor girl, it took so much to get you to know yourself, but there, you’ve finally realized!’

It is a bitter sweet admiration between Scarlett and her readers. You never know when you start loving her, and the next moment she’d do something, you would absolutely hate her for. She is a living flesh and blood conjugation of our minds and aspirations, so real, that reality seems fake before her. Red as wine and warm as the sunshine on cotton fields, she is a true toast to life and a tribute to man, flawed and imperfect and beautiful.

The Last Waltz

(photograph: Jozef Krajko. Source www.1x.com)

The Last Waltz

Standing on the window ledge of the 33rd floor,

She wonders why the traffic

Below is unusually still.

Yesterday's tequila glass

Still clinking in her ears,

She edges inch by inch

On high heels.

A black suede waltz

On the 33rd floor

On the 17th day of the 3rd month.

The music of the taxis,

Ringing like an orchestra,

All awaiting the lady in red,

To make the first move.

One step in front.

One step back.

Two to the right, one to the left.

Back and front.

Aaand let go.

Down on the pavement,

Beside a yellow cab,

A man in a tuxedo,

in black suede shoes,

and Elvis burns,

Heels clicked in attention,

And lips curled in,

Waits.

Up on the 33rd ledge,

She gets ready for the free fall,

Into the waltz of a lifetime.

When death visited

At the break of dawn,

The mullah rises up,

And calls on to allah,

From the minaret top.

An unexpected visitor,

Knocks at the gate of

A house on the 22^nd cross.

A widow sobs like a newborn,

As the silent gate-crasher

Makes his presence felt.

Infiltrating into neighbours’ dreams

Each one isolated in his own fear,

No- one dares to wake up and share.

The unassuaged cry

For a thing lost forever.

An animal’s cry

That invokes the deepest hidden silences

Of turbulent storms.

Like a release of locusts,

Everything bursting forth

Through her cords.

A scream for relief

From the ascending conundrum

That runs a havoc in the mind,

With an inimitable inevitability.

As the muezzin’s cry shrinks

Before the widow’s unleashed sorrow,

Little sisters in the next house,

Cover their ears under the pillow,

Trying to shut out a bad dream.

Everyone is alone

In that hour of fear.

Death is a lonesome affair,

A reminder of lonely liberation.

Orange pillow

Orange pillow

Pillow fights

Distant trains

Silent cries

Orange pillow

Yellow sunflowers

Soaking tears

On lonely nights

Orange pillow

Must have heard

Distant screams

And hurtful sighs

A silent listener,

Soft and light,

On the orange pillow,

Rest your head,

For a peaceful sleep

And a restful night.

In between songs

I slept to Ennio Morricone,

And woke up to Gustavo Santaolalla ,

What was in between,

I do not need to know.

In Sync

Sit alone in the dark and notice yourself suddenly fall silent. The dark heavy silence envelopes around you and me in a vicarious mercurial fashion . Slowly, noises of awareness start creeping into the dark mass. All objects seem more solid than at other times. All voices seem peculiarly unfamiliar. A desperate run for the candle stick is made from all directions, like it was the most heroic act expected to be done at the moment. ‘A change of paradigm’, a self conceited architect would say. All the noise, all the trash, and the chaos of light, just like jargon, weigh heavy in such dark moments ; suspended mid-air, ready to crash down anytime. Blindness and silence – when juxtaposed with each other, seem such a perfect match. An erasure of vision equals an erasure of sound. Only the music remains , one that deserves a listening. Footsteps tap on the ears in rhythmic beats, in sync with your heart beat. A sync of time and feelings. A sync of synchronous butterflies swimming in symmetric seas to a Mozart staccato. When the lights are out , synchronization takes over.

Standing at the centre of the dance floor , shiny disco lights in rhythm to the DJ’s groove, I feel the warm breathing of wriggly bodies, the complete sync of bodies in a mass, a singular entity in a sea of togetherness. There is an enigmatic duality in the discotheque’s role of connecting you with people and at the same time disconnecting you on a personal level. But everything happens in sync. Like the physics experiment in school on resonance, when you blow into one bottle, and can hear the whistle in the adjacent bottle.

A truck rumbles on the highway and the window pane of a house two lanes away shivers. The truck driver is whistling the latest song, ‘Haley paatre! haley kabbanaa ! haley paper kanahoi..’. He is going to catch the new Vijay starrer flick, Junglee after delivering his truck load of sand. The sand in the truck was dug out from the river bank, where a little boy sits plopping stones into the water , watching the sun dissolve in ripples and thinking about his elder brother who has left him there and still not returned. Two lanes away from the highway, the resonating window pane looks into the room of a teenager deep in sleep and dreaming of drowning in the same sea, wave after wave after wave. As he wakes up to the tremor, the truck driver’s song, the little ripples in the pond ,the waves in his dreams, are all in sync. At one moment in the same link , in different paradigms.

When Cinderella left behind her glass slipper at the stroke of midnight, it was the last figment of her enchanted state. After the 24 hours of being a princess , she went back to her normal self, the chariot back into pumpkin, the horses back to mice, the robe to rags and the lonely glass slipper vanished with her enchanted 24 hours. But the slipper she left behind, remained a reality; a metaphor of her parallel paradigm. The glass slipper lies now on the drafting table of an architecture student. She gazes at it every now and then, and transports herself into Cinderella’s time. Only this glass slipper, with its swooping sole rising high up to a towering heel , perched precariously yet touching lightly upon the surface , stands like a crystal clear negation of all things around, solid and dark. In sync with its ground, the glass slipper beckons to shed her opaqueness and synchronize with the beat of life around her, like water ready to ripple in sync with the breeze.

Remembering 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, as we sat in the verandah and darkness fell.Having waved goodbye to my father, who left me with dear little grandma and grandpa, tears streamed down my eyes, as I sang bhajans for ajju.. 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 lights 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? How much ever 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 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 that she had taken care of it and it was safe to come out now. Later , though 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 .

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 , on this Children’s day, November the 14^th, 2009.