Notes. From. Down. South.

If you care to make sense of these drafts. Perhaps, I shall not bother with them, but still.

In the event of a deluge, the bags of sugar  and rice would have to be stitched at the seams, and the big fat rats would have to be driven out from the kitchen with noise, and perhaps, brooms with long handles. We seem to have enough space for 

-> The French perfumes.The tea cozy set. 

-> Female buffalo corpses. The milk man’s supply of urea.

-> Textbooks used to barricade the entrances.

-> One hundred twenty two lipsticks, ranging from black to organdy. Sigh.

-> Harvested cultures of silverfish.

The piano grand stand, and the sheet music would have to be covered with wax, and the walls would be covered with a dense growth of mould.

->Of my love for the mold formations on the ceiling. And the rococo plaster of paris work done by a senile old artisan from the old city, whose grandfather had decorated the nawab’s palace in the days of plenty.

-> Of the djinns in the arborium, and the dark creature I saw lurking in the outhouse, whose presence would make the generator hum soft.

-> Of my neighbor’s daughters, who would creep up onto our terrace, and peep over my shoulder at the sketches I labored at, of the plumbing for a palace of many pleasures.

-> Of the weird colored patterns they would decorate the floor with, inspired by my meticulous designs, and the colors of the spring.

-> Of my old woman who would have to be left alone in her cubby hole on the top floor,.

-> Of her belongings would have to be set on fire,for they would set to rot and smell like dead animals. However, I shall leave her enough space for her evening calisthenics, and futile prayers. 

->Febrile incantations would then resound amid the marble corridors, and the terracotta sculptures that father had retrieved from the ruins of Hampi and installed in the arborium.

-> The idols, the incense, the scepters of havans past and present, the old woman in her youth, a photo of hers, vying any beauty that ever lived, and the tales she told us, of monsters, and women, and children.

The gods shall have to be given ten square feet of the top floor, and father would have to be left to his means in his study, to suffocate himself with whatever it is he keeps smoking. 

->Painted china dolls. The floating masses of decapitated Barbie dolls.

Father, always brooding.

Mother, always praying.

I shall tend to my potted plants, continue my patient experiments with the cello, and work on a map of the outer regions of a country I visited in my youth.

->And read John Evelyn’s diaries, to set my dreams to a curious color, and then  photoshop myself, lucidly, into portions of his life.

The cousin who always visits in times of duress. And speaks of migrating to Africa or Canada.

->And looks like a curious modern day avatar of Dev Anand. And listens to 1950s Indian Jazz bands to fight stress.

-> Of my fantasies of drowning him in a pool of oil.

On reading ” A Lady’s Diary of the Siege of L-“

“It would take a man from outside years to fit in here. It would take a decade of hanging around helpless among the plazas, navigating the stinking dark lanes in an attempt to make sense of his surroundings. And if he stuck around too long, his grave would be marked among the many who had come, and lost themselves here, the English, the Normans, the Persians, the Turks, and more recently, the Bengalis, the Punjabis and the Marwadis. Or if it were to his liking, be burnt in the Hindu manner and let his remains be washed away in the same river the leather mills emptied their filth into, and depressed high school students would jump into, and fishermen would find buffalo calves and deformed monkey babies in their nets.

The sellers of kebabs and meatloaf, greasy potato “tikkis”, roast corn cobs spiced with lime, and the sellers of beetle leaf, and cigarettes, and alcohol, and mints, came together in the square, and drank cheap sugary black tea together, all taking shelter in the colonnade while the rain dripped down the eaves and trickled into the runnels by the street, and the urchins ran across the street, newspaper wrapped around their shriveled bodies.

Of loving the birds, the trees, the people, the language. Which he reminded himself, were all in a state of flux. The Siberian white crane used to fly above the city every winter, according to the old newspapers columns.

Of the electric cables that clouded the entrance of a lane like an evil bird’s nest, the memsaabs and the government babus who couldn’t bear the heat in these quarters (and yet could not do without the   street food and the cheap ethnic wear sold here), and yelled at the traffic, blessing the world with a cool perfumed air-conditioned gust that made the beggar boy smile and wipe their window screen with greater joy.

Of the old ladies, who bore titles only their grandmothers could have made sense of, on the top floors of decaying havelis, who would stretch out on their little balconies, and fan themselves, taking in all they could of the occasional passerby.

Of practising his English with the Americans who studied Urdu at the university,  who admired the stitching on his tattered kurta cuffs, and hung on to his every word in search of obscure words he had heard in his childhood, and laughed at his Bush impersonations .

Of then going to see the girl at the bookstore, in her elegant blue chiffon salwar. And looking up at her from the pages of the illustrated Persian epics illuminated ages back here in the city, and asking her to read out unpronounceable names from the catalog, and reveling in the music of her voice.

Of then retreating to his room to read from the epics and the fantasies and the romances of old, the poets who set his blood on fire, the battles that were fought on the river side, and the very streets he walked, sometimes hungry, sometimes contemplating contemporaneous accounts from Afsany Nikalovich Petrov, the biologist from Kursk, who had observed, like a candid creature from Mars, the city, before and after its destruction, and who had joined the rebels out of pure curiosity, to document their side of the story.

On his attempts at writing the novel that speaks of the splendors of another age, the djinns and the fakirs, the princesses and the song-birds and the court eunuchs and the court poets, and the last of a species of beasts, lowing miserably at the onslaught of cannon on the city walls.  

Of then being driven out by his screeching aunt out onto the street again, laughed at by the neighborhood for his wretched wastrel ways, and smoking with the wretched rickshaw-pullers of the quarter, and then, running drunk around decaying buildings with the depressed literature student he’d met at the lawyers’ protest rally(what a droll spectacle that was), and collapsing in a wine-induced euphoria, that the poets of the Ming era would envy.

Of the early morning clamor of kids around the block, who passed the quarter on their way to work, or school, or cyber cafes, and spoke no longer of films and books and cigarettes and girls, but of prime time American TV series, and computer games, and their Internet lives.

Of feeling old and out of place, in the most outmoded quarter of the old city.

The sea,the sea

Yes.
Cinematic.
Nice soft music.
I suck at verse,
But here goes...

Blistering hot sand,
The waves a mess inside my head.

Salt water.

Stand right in the face of the wave,
And let it bend your knee.

Let it wash away your spectacles,
If you've forgotten to take them off.

And breath all you can,
While the tide recedes.

Imagine,
A black saint bowed,
(With his furrowed leonine brow,
Beetling above his eyes).

The air,
Chants through his teeth.

The air,
The sick sea breeze,
That murders fishermen's wives with longing,
Balloons his cassock,
Singes his dry salt-bitter throat,
Ruffles-Unsettles his mangy salt-pepper beard,
Drowns out his Amens...

Imagine further,
A mobile phone,
Half sunk in the sand.

Squeaking out...
The last "Out of Battery" squeak it ever gave.

The Nature of the dream

“And I was free like the wolf I dreamed of, had lost all memory of men, was licking my wounds tenderly. Softly treading on the Siberian snow, I slipped in among the pines. My sweet shadow and I are one now. “

-From Badbaksh Miyan's diary of his Russian journey


Up late. Woke to dark cold surroundings,cuddled up in a soft blanket. Someone came up and drew back the curtains. Light from the street, an unnatural amber glow. A moment or two later, the shriek call of a cat in the distance. Or maybe cats. Two cats.

And the crickets. Why do they always chirp only when it’s dark?

Here,in a boy’s room,a man sits hunched up on the side of a bed, undersized, the bedsheet with its wicked greedy Bugs Bunny faces all over, crying out in angry undertones, Where's my carrot,Doc? Yet he feels so well-fed, so content, so blissfully sleepy.

And as I get out of bed, I step on one of those pencil crayons we no longer get in the market. How I lovingly scrawled all over the walls of our rented apartment with just such a crayon,( how I drew a princess with a sweet smile, and a pretty hat, and a sympathetic uncle came up and told me it looked like a hairy baboon)

I held the stick against the light, and sighed. Even in the amber light, it glowed a magical blue.

I flashed it about, and saw to my utter surprise, a ten key toy synthesizer I’d long given up for lost, lying safely on the glass top table. Almost out of breath,I played the only song I’d ever learnt, a four note wonder that always filled me with a sad joy.

“Silent night,Holy night”,wept my toy.

Yet,even as I played, I discovered that the chair I was sitting on was a bit too small for me, it almost broke under my weight. And my fingers. Oh they’d grown fat and clumsy! (In another world, I would be this long haired, sad-faced pianist-(Felix Mendelssohn?Not Chopin!), staring deep into the void, while made-up women danced to his dark melancholic waltzes, and a certain red-haired countess kept time with her left foot.)

A sudden urge overtook me to look for my collection of toys, all those little men I’d made friends with, and fought battles with. There were the evil Doctor X, whose arm had been broken in a skirmish with the Bowman, and Skeletor, whose head was turned the other side and wouldn’t straighten up no matter how hard you’d try.Maybe I might give it a go tonight, ease things for the poor ugly slob.

Yet of course, there are somethings you arent allowed even in your dreams. Like playing with toys in the deep of the night.

Ghosts arose from the past, as they always do at that hour of the night. A boy servant who had taught me how to draw a deer. And who was too much of a free spirit to clean the toilets. And when he did run away, I had made a resolve to seek him out. For he had taught me all but how to draw the ears and the nose! And I had soon filled out notebooks with portraits of faceless deer, on the run from hunters who looked like schoolteachers. I imagined just such a creature arising from the shadows around me, deer-faced men, but the buzzing of the mosquitoes kept me from getting too scared.

As they bit at my ankles, I noticed my body after a very long time. Of course, I had grown over the years, but yet it all felt so same from within. One tug at my socks. Still, the gaping holes at the ankles. As always. One finger across my hair. As unkempt as ever. One hand over my heart. Still, like the swallow’s heart in winter, aching for love and warmth.

And reluctantly, I drew myself outside my dream and looked out the window. In the distance, the moths flocked to the streetlights, and a dumb silence kept everything still. Even the crickets seemed to have dozed off.

And I tried to wake up. And I tried to escape the body of this “rational” adult, this pretentious fool who knew his algebra and geometry, who knew how to make things work, and who could kill a man with his formidable frown.

With great reluctance, I walked over to the wall with the crayon in my hand.



What I wake up to

Pardon the egghead vocab :-)

Always been a sucker for love songs.But honestly, this song holds a special meaning for me, in times as these, when every song on air stinks of love and hope. We so love to kid ourselves with false hopes.This one bridges that chasm of despair, with it's innocence.

Came across this gem of a lyric, quite by chance. Composed by an anonymous Elizabethan gentleman(or knave or spymaster or essayist or glass grinder or chambermaid, who knows) and set to music by John Dowland.

My favorite fantasy is to recreate some moments of his life just after he's come up with the song. A close guess would be- He'd be so amused with himself, that he'd forget himself, and the next moment, drown his sorrows in a pint of sickly yellow Elizabethan beer, smash to death a fly with his coarse palm, yell his heart out, lose a few teeth in a brawl with the chairs and the glasses, mumble some Greek, invent a few abuse words, and wish he'd never loved. But that sounds melodramatic. It could be a nasty schoolboy who'd fallen for his chambermaid, and while poring over some books he was forbidden to read, a folio of Shakespeare's bawd lyrics...Hell!

All the song needs is a lute or viol, a sweet mezzo voice, and of course, a muse. Since I have none(ahem,ahem), I get by with a '03 version by "The Dowlands", which I have set as my alarm clock tune. And rightly so, my neighbors get up before I do.

John Dowland's music animates the song, brings it to life, adds strains of sweet despair to the haunting lyric. Who knows? Maybe Shakespeare lent him a hand!

Here's the song.

"Awake, sweet love! Thou art return'd,
My heart, which long in absence mourn'd,
Lives now in perfect joy.
Let love, which never absent dies,
Now live forever in her eyes,
Whence came my first annoy.

Only herself hath seemed fair,
She only I could love,
She only drove me to despair,
When she unkind did prove.
Despair did make me wish to die,
That I my griefs might end,
She only which did make me fly,
My state may now amend.

If she esteem thee, now aught worth,
She will not grieve thy love henceforth,
Which so despair hath prov'd.
Despair hath proved now in me,
That love will not inconstant be,
Though long in vain I lov'd.

If she at last reward thy love,
And all thy harm repair,
Thy happiness will sweeter prove,
Rais'd up from deep despair.
And if that now thou welcome be
When though with her dost meet,
She, all the while, but play'd with thee,
To make thy joys more sweet."