I am lame. I just ranted for next Sunday's TKP. Here is is:
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Still Sixteen Hours!
Dark! There are more things to see behind closed eyes than with eyes wide open: at least the eyes marry with the mind, bring squiggles and bursts and sparks of color behind the eyelids. And with a minute’s flirting, thoughts color their own merry circus, one bright image leads to a train of others, time passes without struggle. But, eyes wide open and searching, there is nothing but a bill of knees knocked in the dark, misplaced notes and emasculation -exasperation to deal with: still sixteen hours without electricity! Mid-noon is blanketed with the same doom that must have smothered the dark ages: the rattles and whirrs of modern conveniences disappear, now information doesn’t come my way, nothing can be made or unmade, reason itself seems to spiral down a dark well. There is nothing to do on the computer or see through it; there isn’t anything to watch on the television. Deferred deadlines lurk at the edge of conscience, scrape at the mind’s peace, and erode it bit by bit. Even the blood-pressure rises in protest.
Yet, tempered with a little statistics, even this isn’t too bad: Pakistanis, at the moment, are worse off than Nepalis, for one, and a large majority of the Nepali population remains without electricity, for another. It is foolish to look for a better human condition when there is no water in the reservoirs and the rivers seem intent upon annual destruction, and when the party in power enjoys forgetting its own role in birthing the malaise. Charity comes swiftest with the knowledge that one is better off, much better off, compared to the most abject: what little we have of Ampere and Volt, we must celebrate like the revolutionary nation that we are. There is electricity, a whooping eight-hour of it, and that must be reason to celebrate.
In any case, electricity is a demon that has the capacity to irreparably alter the surrounding: it announces its arrival with pylons and aluminum towers and hums and chirps and stormy sparks. It undulates and coils, shakes like a silver skein as it climbs over hitherto unobstructed hills to cleave valleys which nothing worse than the hand of man has touched. It arrives as if it is needed: to power radios, for instance, and bring foreign beats and babble to the children, encouraging them to gyrate and twist to strange ideas.
Electricity is bad. I remember when it entered my life, even in that primordial flare showing its full range: Electricity is at its worst when it can bind us entirely, and then, still dazzling with its brightness, push us into the abyss of darkness. Bhim Bahadur kaka who knew light bulbs because he had been in the Indian Army, came over to fix a single bulb into the holder hanging from the sooty rafters of our kitchen. Taking caution against its potential to sting, he stood on a wooden chair and screwed the bulb in. There was a bright flash, too bright, the coil inside burning to a vivid blue, before it whimpered, shuddered at what it saw, and turned into a sunset-copper, lighting only Bhim bahadur kaka’s eyes. And it died.
Yet, that wasn’t the only drama that electricity brought to the lives of people in Abu Khaireni: the village was to be the site for the Marshyandgi Hydro-Electricity Project, the biggest of its kind when it was announced, or so we were told. Thousands of laborers descended into the narrow valley to tunnel through the granite under Chhimkeshwari hills. When a few Japanese engineers died with two dozen Nepali laborers, their funerals was a sight to see, unrivalled in pageant and curio until a circus came through town almost seven years later. Young women disappeared and feces appeared everywhere. The old—men, women, trees, streams and fields, the forests—choked under an envelope of dust, the life slowly squeezed out of them, as they young dismantled the mountain, the river, their heritage.
The children’s games were pushed away from their houses near the highway, now torn up by crane trades, to the river drained dry. Every day brought fresh news of new accident, theft, absconding, elopement, distress and death. The stench of feces increased, finding a new surface in every farmer’s field, under each large tree, even inside the enclosure where the Magar people’s Budhi Barahi lived under a fig tree. On my way to the school one morning, I saw the hook of a two-ton crane unlatch and swing with the inching crane, cleanly scattering away the head of a man while his torso crumpled on the spot where he had stood. All of this for electricity.
So that we may have rice-cookers and refrigerators and vacuum cleaners and pornography and the luxury of emailing articles to our editors. I think my village suffered enough for the electricity it generates. I can’t complain: Khaireni has only a few hours of power cuts each day. That is just, I think, given what surgical horror the valley had to undergo to make its contribution of 69 MW, unlike Kathmandu, which still stumbles ahead through sixteen hours of darkness. Perhaps, this too is just. But this is small comforts for someone whose life is tied to a wily mistress, the punishing ways of Bijuli.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Commie Bastards Hate Freedom of Expression!
The United government in Nepal has passed an ordinance requiring the scripts, and details about the cast and crew, of any movie that is to be shown in the theaters. This has always been the case with Nepali movies, but now the rule has been extended to foreign films as well.
What foreign films? Nepali theaters show perhaps half-dozen Hollywood titles every year. More than half of the box-office revenue in Nepal comes from Hindi movies from Mumbai. This ordinance is aimed at a lazy, unimaginative, derivative-drivel-peddling Nepali film industry. If good taste and common sense were the only censors in the country, the half-dozen or so Maoist movies that have come out in the last two years would be the first to be barred from the theaters.
My questions to the government:
If, at a time when a large part of the Nepali population is claiming Hindi as their first language, how does it make sense to ask Hindi scripts to be translated either into English or Nepali?
What about a Gurung film? A Bhojpuri film? A Newari film? There are dozens of titles in each [perhaps just a dozen in Gurung, but Bhojpuri and Newari are much mroe prolific]. They are indigenous languages. Must their scripts also be translated into English or Nepali before the movies can be shown? Why? Kyeno, Commie Babu, kyeno?
What do they aim to gain by keeping foreign voices out of the theaters? Do I not, as an free citizen of a free country, have the right to decide whom to listen to and whom to ignore?
I know this is just a rant, but dyamn, my government is making my chosen vocation of writing and selling cheap, pornographic, violent stories a very difficult task.
My next project: "The Life and Times of Prachanda, our Supreme and Benevolent Leader, How he is Like Stalin [Just The Good Stuff]"
What foreign films? Nepali theaters show perhaps half-dozen Hollywood titles every year. More than half of the box-office revenue in Nepal comes from Hindi movies from Mumbai. This ordinance is aimed at a lazy, unimaginative, derivative-drivel-peddling Nepali film industry. If good taste and common sense were the only censors in the country, the half-dozen or so Maoist movies that have come out in the last two years would be the first to be barred from the theaters.
My questions to the government:
If, at a time when a large part of the Nepali population is claiming Hindi as their first language, how does it make sense to ask Hindi scripts to be translated either into English or Nepali?
What about a Gurung film? A Bhojpuri film? A Newari film? There are dozens of titles in each [perhaps just a dozen in Gurung, but Bhojpuri and Newari are much mroe prolific]. They are indigenous languages. Must their scripts also be translated into English or Nepali before the movies can be shown? Why? Kyeno, Commie Babu, kyeno?
What do they aim to gain by keeping foreign voices out of the theaters? Do I not, as an free citizen of a free country, have the right to decide whom to listen to and whom to ignore?
I know this is just a rant, but dyamn, my government is making my chosen vocation of writing and selling cheap, pornographic, violent stories a very difficult task.
My next project: "The Life and Times of Prachanda, our Supreme and Benevolent Leader, How he is Like Stalin [Just The Good Stuff]"
Monday, February 23, 2009
Zeenat Comes Calling
I am back in Kathmandu, after an eventful border-crossing, which cost me a lot of money, to be honest, although none of it went in bribes. Tangawallahs, customs, buswallahs, hotelwallahs... I wish people sold their service in a more straightforward, more honest manner.
Dal-bhat never tasted as good as the dal-bhat in Palung, where I finally got to eat after almost 24 hours of nothing but a bottle of Sprite.
Back to the grind, now, feeling much poor, but still a little tired, a little lazy.
So, Sophie Butcher, as I said I would, here is yesterday's TKP essay:
Zeenat Comes Calling
[I can't find a link to the "expressions" page in TKP's archives for yesterday, but I did see it in print, this morning, in yesterday's paper]
It is not easy on the nerves, I discover and resist, the waiting for a foretold guest: I have to clean the house, clean the kitchen, prepare a meal. Hell if I will, I think, I say aloud, walk out to throw a robust tantrum, but there is no point in protesting: the guest is special to those who will bring her to their home. I am incidental to the scene, so I must attend to matters peripheral. And, it is a moral trap they set for me: she is old and she is alone, they remind me, as if drafting an initial list of characteristics against offences to which I have taken a vow. But, they implore with a passion that breaks their voices and brings tears to their eyes—It is Zeenat Aman! How can you! Just be nice!
So I clean the house. I even take the trash out to the pile where there is always a soul or two keeping vigil. I swing the bagful of refuse in a circle a few times before letting it fly, aiming for the largest cluster of crows picking apart another clump of rubbish. The birds squawk; some leap and flit, more experienced and athletic ones affect a short, effective hop away from the missile's target, but saunter back to pry and peck at the bag. To them, my intentions mean nothing: to them the material mysteries of the universe are better revealed. They know how a thrown thing, or my maniacal shine of murder for them, pertains to their peculiar existence. A woman emerges from the shadows to wave her stick at the birds, gives me a look which humiliates me deeply in a way I have never before known, before prying apart the plastic bag that flew from my hand. She combs through the rubbish: from it she takes the milk-packet plastic, the big-mall plastic bag, the drinking-water plastic bottle, the twisted-up roll of newspaper with its achar-stained opinion page. There is in the bag, with potato and potol peel, shame wrapped in layers.
Italo Calvino writes in an essay about living in France the idea that what we throw away is truest measure of how we have lived. In it is proof of what we have touched and modified, what we have produced but failed to sell, the detritus of what we piece together to live and pursue security and satisfaction. If I have thrown away, with theatrical flair, constitutes that which somebody else ekes a living out of, there is something very wrong with the picture.
I am incapable of averting my gaze, and she from me, as we labor in this mutual bond: I try the suave luxury of creating a condition, while she rubs against the coarseness of it. I flee, I rush towards the market. Rohu fish is preferred over meat. Cauliflower and peas are always pleasant. I can cook lauka for daal.
I am still cleaning when Elena rings the bell, once, twice, six times before I have washed my hand and walked to the door. She is alone. This is the fourth day she has returned without Zeenat Aman, on each day putting me to work cooking four-course meals. I am about to let spew my usual: “What the hell!”
She asks me instead to run down the stairs to carry Zeenat Aman home. I run downstairs. Zeenat Aman refuses to be carried. She can't really see, but she bravely tries to keep up appearances, like that forger-thief in The Great Escape. She has to surreptitiously throw her hands ahead to read her environment's tactile makeup. From her muttering, I surmise that she imagines she is still in her neighborhood of Topsia, going up a few steps to a shop she knows. The third floor apartment is five flights up.
Sophie holds Zeenat Aman’s hands as their eyes lock in a silent embrace. They are as alien to each other as foreignness can get: Sophie is a twenty year old student from a Sidney suburb; Zeenat Aman has lived in the streets of Kolkata since she was ten years old. Her father came from Bengal to pull a rickshaw and was promptly digested by the metropolis, followed within months by his wife. Zeenat Aman is senile now, has been cared for by the poorest of Kolkata’s poor because she was once able-bodied, genial, and charitable in her own capacity. Now they hold hands, one pair of eyes keen, the other feeble, turned away from a world that has revealed too much of itself.
She keeps searching for her hair. “We don’t cut our hair until we die,” she says, miming a veil of tresses over a dead woman’s breasts. She tries to recognize me, speaks a few words in Bangla, few more in Urdu. “Where is the salt?” Zeenat Aman demands. “Too much rice. Of course, I can eat fish. Who cooked this spinach?” Elena tries to convince her that the spinach is good for the eyes. Zeenat Aman pushes a large scoop of it into her mouth, spits in disgust. She demands that her chappals be brought to her. She stands leaning on her walking stick. “I am going home,” she declares. Then she falls on a mattress in the corner, careful to let her feet hang to a side, and snores softly.
It is impossible to enter the bathroom: the putrid sick-sweet smell of layers of slough and skin cling to the walls and tiles. Elena and Sophie have washed Zeenat Aman twice, cutting her hair, delousing and rubbing an ointment to kill the scabies on her body. After five strong washes, the stained gray sari they brought her in emerges a startling, heart-breaking pink. Elena has dressed her in a sari the color of fresh turmeric roots. Zeenat Aman has left nothing in the corner where she had been living for the past few years because she has brought her walking stick and her chappals with her. In perhaps an hour, she will have to leave, for a new life in a nursing home. Even in her sleep the walking stick is just an inch away from a hand that twitches in a dream. Her feet hover over the dear pair of chappals.
She sits up in a fit and says something in Bangla. There is a knot she has tied into the new sari: it is a pouch of tobacco. She brings it up to her face, is satisfied, falls back to sleep. “She thinks we are going to steal her tobacco,” Elena says. Sophie and I chuckle. We sit motionless, riveted by the sight of an old woman sleeping in the corner where I usually sleep. Zeenat Aman turns in her sleep, and her feet are no longer hovering over the chappals. She must feel at home.
Dal-bhat never tasted as good as the dal-bhat in Palung, where I finally got to eat after almost 24 hours of nothing but a bottle of Sprite.
Back to the grind, now, feeling much poor, but still a little tired, a little lazy.
So, Sophie Butcher, as I said I would, here is yesterday's TKP essay:
Zeenat Comes Calling
[I can't find a link to the "expressions" page in TKP's archives for yesterday, but I did see it in print, this morning, in yesterday's paper]
It is not easy on the nerves, I discover and resist, the waiting for a foretold guest: I have to clean the house, clean the kitchen, prepare a meal. Hell if I will, I think, I say aloud, walk out to throw a robust tantrum, but there is no point in protesting: the guest is special to those who will bring her to their home. I am incidental to the scene, so I must attend to matters peripheral. And, it is a moral trap they set for me: she is old and she is alone, they remind me, as if drafting an initial list of characteristics against offences to which I have taken a vow. But, they implore with a passion that breaks their voices and brings tears to their eyes—It is Zeenat Aman! How can you! Just be nice!
So I clean the house. I even take the trash out to the pile where there is always a soul or two keeping vigil. I swing the bagful of refuse in a circle a few times before letting it fly, aiming for the largest cluster of crows picking apart another clump of rubbish. The birds squawk; some leap and flit, more experienced and athletic ones affect a short, effective hop away from the missile's target, but saunter back to pry and peck at the bag. To them, my intentions mean nothing: to them the material mysteries of the universe are better revealed. They know how a thrown thing, or my maniacal shine of murder for them, pertains to their peculiar existence. A woman emerges from the shadows to wave her stick at the birds, gives me a look which humiliates me deeply in a way I have never before known, before prying apart the plastic bag that flew from my hand. She combs through the rubbish: from it she takes the milk-packet plastic, the big-mall plastic bag, the drinking-water plastic bottle, the twisted-up roll of newspaper with its achar-stained opinion page. There is in the bag, with potato and potol peel, shame wrapped in layers.
Italo Calvino writes in an essay about living in France the idea that what we throw away is truest measure of how we have lived. In it is proof of what we have touched and modified, what we have produced but failed to sell, the detritus of what we piece together to live and pursue security and satisfaction. If I have thrown away, with theatrical flair, constitutes that which somebody else ekes a living out of, there is something very wrong with the picture.
I am incapable of averting my gaze, and she from me, as we labor in this mutual bond: I try the suave luxury of creating a condition, while she rubs against the coarseness of it. I flee, I rush towards the market. Rohu fish is preferred over meat. Cauliflower and peas are always pleasant. I can cook lauka for daal.
I am still cleaning when Elena rings the bell, once, twice, six times before I have washed my hand and walked to the door. She is alone. This is the fourth day she has returned without Zeenat Aman, on each day putting me to work cooking four-course meals. I am about to let spew my usual: “What the hell!”
She asks me instead to run down the stairs to carry Zeenat Aman home. I run downstairs. Zeenat Aman refuses to be carried. She can't really see, but she bravely tries to keep up appearances, like that forger-thief in The Great Escape. She has to surreptitiously throw her hands ahead to read her environment's tactile makeup. From her muttering, I surmise that she imagines she is still in her neighborhood of Topsia, going up a few steps to a shop she knows. The third floor apartment is five flights up.
Sophie holds Zeenat Aman’s hands as their eyes lock in a silent embrace. They are as alien to each other as foreignness can get: Sophie is a twenty year old student from a Sidney suburb; Zeenat Aman has lived in the streets of Kolkata since she was ten years old. Her father came from Bengal to pull a rickshaw and was promptly digested by the metropolis, followed within months by his wife. Zeenat Aman is senile now, has been cared for by the poorest of Kolkata’s poor because she was once able-bodied, genial, and charitable in her own capacity. Now they hold hands, one pair of eyes keen, the other feeble, turned away from a world that has revealed too much of itself.
She keeps searching for her hair. “We don’t cut our hair until we die,” she says, miming a veil of tresses over a dead woman’s breasts. She tries to recognize me, speaks a few words in Bangla, few more in Urdu. “Where is the salt?” Zeenat Aman demands. “Too much rice. Of course, I can eat fish. Who cooked this spinach?” Elena tries to convince her that the spinach is good for the eyes. Zeenat Aman pushes a large scoop of it into her mouth, spits in disgust. She demands that her chappals be brought to her. She stands leaning on her walking stick. “I am going home,” she declares. Then she falls on a mattress in the corner, careful to let her feet hang to a side, and snores softly.
It is impossible to enter the bathroom: the putrid sick-sweet smell of layers of slough and skin cling to the walls and tiles. Elena and Sophie have washed Zeenat Aman twice, cutting her hair, delousing and rubbing an ointment to kill the scabies on her body. After five strong washes, the stained gray sari they brought her in emerges a startling, heart-breaking pink. Elena has dressed her in a sari the color of fresh turmeric roots. Zeenat Aman has left nothing in the corner where she had been living for the past few years because she has brought her walking stick and her chappals with her. In perhaps an hour, she will have to leave, for a new life in a nursing home. Even in her sleep the walking stick is just an inch away from a hand that twitches in a dream. Her feet hover over the dear pair of chappals.
She sits up in a fit and says something in Bangla. There is a knot she has tied into the new sari: it is a pouch of tobacco. She brings it up to her face, is satisfied, falls back to sleep. “She thinks we are going to steal her tobacco,” Elena says. Sophie and I chuckle. We sit motionless, riveted by the sight of an old woman sleeping in the corner where I usually sleep. Zeenat Aman turns in her sleep, and her feet are no longer hovering over the chappals. She must feel at home.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Exit, chased by a bear
Shout Out to Lily Weed!
I visit your blog whenever I need a laugh. Then I go "Weeeeeeed!"
My Kolkata visit is coming to an end. I will be in Kathmandu by next Sunday, so that I can start meeting with people beginning Monday. I feel lazier, fatter, more dull now than a month ago, but I have spent a fabulous month here. The heat is bordering on unbearable now. I don't want to stay back to experience the truly unbearable heat of March and April, before monsoon kicks in.
I have been checking the little cluster-map thingy to the right of the page. It seems more and more people are visiting, although "more" rarely goes over ten, or fifteen at most.
I enjoy having a captive readership. It is feeling nice-nice only.
Rajiv Bartaula, now a doctor in the US, posted [on facebook] a few pictures from our last days/year at Budhanilkantha: I am a lean, already balding boy. I saw a photo Elena had printed of me visiting a school in Dhapa, north of Kolkata, where kids swarmed me. Some called me "Aunty" because they were accustomed to the women volunteers who often visited. A bit perplexing at first, but easily forgotten once they start chatting in Bangla and asking questions, absolutely non of which I understood. In that picture, I am a fat, bald man with broken glasses. Time does change a few things.
I visit your blog whenever I need a laugh. Then I go "Weeeeeeed!"
My Kolkata visit is coming to an end. I will be in Kathmandu by next Sunday, so that I can start meeting with people beginning Monday. I feel lazier, fatter, more dull now than a month ago, but I have spent a fabulous month here. The heat is bordering on unbearable now. I don't want to stay back to experience the truly unbearable heat of March and April, before monsoon kicks in.
I have been checking the little cluster-map thingy to the right of the page. It seems more and more people are visiting, although "more" rarely goes over ten, or fifteen at most.
I enjoy having a captive readership. It is feeling nice-nice only.
Rajiv Bartaula, now a doctor in the US, posted [on facebook] a few pictures from our last days/year at Budhanilkantha: I am a lean, already balding boy. I saw a photo Elena had printed of me visiting a school in Dhapa, north of Kolkata, where kids swarmed me. Some called me "Aunty" because they were accustomed to the women volunteers who often visited. A bit perplexing at first, but easily forgotten once they start chatting in Bangla and asking questions, absolutely non of which I understood. In that picture, I am a fat, bald man with broken glasses. Time does change a few things.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Khichari and Blindfold
Another essay that has been sent off to TKP...
I am a little more productive now, although not as much as i would like to be... but the gears are grinding along better...
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Khichari and Blindfolds
I knew the woman would eventually get me into trouble: she is always pausing to sniff the flowers while I want to rush by, to get safely into a familiar territory where I don't have to answer or question, where, for heaven's sake, I am left alone to brood or simply stare out of the window. Everybody knows her, and therefore everybody wants to know what I am doing in their street, plodding along in the mornings to buy milk and eggs, sitting morosely through the afternoons outside the tea-stall at the end of their alley, scrutinizing them with piercing—if feigned—scholarship, as if categorizing them into pages of a thick volume in my head. Nobody here knows my name, except an aged singer spinster, who has surely forgotten my name or my face. I have nothing to say to the children and shorn widows who instinctively pucker their lips and squint when they look at me, not knowing quite what to make of my presence in the alley where they empty their spittoons or throw their cricket balls.
Now the woman has got me into trouble: instead of demurring and closing the door behind her, she has laughed with the thirteen-year old boy who has organized the puja, and disappeared just around the corner for a bowl of khichari. I follow her with bags full of grocery: eggplants, eggs, pumpkin flowers, two hundred grams of Rohu fish, three tomatoes, a bag of muesli. She comes around the corner, a leaf-bowl duno full of spicy khichari in her hands, the idol of Saraswati still smiling two full days after her puja. I have no choice but to venture around the corner.
I have so far avoided this corner, barely ten paces beyond the door into which I daily disappear, or from which I reemerge into the community's realm that is the thin, eternally disturbed, incessantly dug-up, cat-strewn, widow-watched alley. I do not know where the road leads in that direction: there is no tea-stall or ration-store around that corner, I am certain of that. But that doesn't preclude the possibility of there waiting for me a charming lane with overflowing window-boxes of bougainvillea, or a particularly attractive window that lets waft the soft strains of music sweet to the ears and calls out a comely woman or two who will smile at me before closing the window, flicking on the switch to a chamber where cultural confusion flits in a blood-mingling flea-dance of seduction, and where I am rendered incapable of deciding if that was withdrawal or invitation, if she lowered her eyes to close me out or to draw me in with her lashes.
The boy grins as he brings me a bowl of khichari, as a part of the puja celebrations. This is a city run by communists—the longest elected communist government in the world, I am reminded by its citizens whenever the opportunity arises, which is very often, once they come to know I hail from the principality of Prachanda Dahal. Yet, their pujas drag on forever: even Kumar, Shiva's other son largely forgotten in Nepal, has his own puja, and it is sobering to remember that I have seen him only as an enamelled relief on the western gate to Pashupatinath temple, where I take my visiting non-Hindu friends to appreciate the golden shape of Nandi's giant testicles as he squats facing east. Like Nandi's golden frame, the steaming duno of khichari is warm and golden. I am too hungry to protest. I dig into the wallet for the woman's visiting card to eat the khichari, but she is a wild woman with her own ideas about loyalty and integrity: she insists that I imitate her, eat with my fingers coated black in Kolkata-grime, tasting first the smoke and salt of a sick city, then the khichari spices.
I am furious. I am the incarnation of Rudra himself, but only for about ten seconds. The spicy khichari tastes of turmeric and chillies more than anything, but it also a comfort food that caresses the mind in its most infantile corners: it is glorified dal-bhat, it assures across a gulf of unfamiliarity, it melts foreignness into friendliness.
Then they blindfold me and give me a stick. Fifteen paces away is a single brick on the asphalt. I am to find my way to the brick after being spun around a couple of times: to strike a grounded piñata, to toe and stumble towards an unseen goal, and reaching it, to announce my arrival with a savage blow. In the blindness, in the strict binding of my vision, I realize how much I am an outsider, and for that reason alone, how much a spectacle, how much welcome as a comic relief, which must be, I insist in the moment, the first invitation towards acceptance. I am good at throwing darts, I remind myself, as if that means anything at all, except that it recalls another moment long ago in a friend's friends' basement where I had to stand alongside another woman, a friend again, proving that I was no simple foreign freak, but a man of quirks and romance.
There are small, rodent snickers from children and gruff laughs from men and sighs and coughs that serve as the language of women in this city as I walk aslant towards the goal. I walk into the mounds on either side of the alley, correcting the map in my mind, flexing my foot in subtle degrees. I am blind. There is an audience outside of me, whose faces I can't reconstruct because I have not taken the time to know them, watching me, waiting for me to stumble and plant my face into the asphalt. I give up on the goal, but I know it is important to persist until a conclusion is announced. I step forward.
Until I reach and toe the brick, very slightly, as if testing its verity, as if checking the intention of those that watch me. There is nothing more to do but to wait for the trumpet of arrival. I do not want to strike the brick—that registers as mildly vulgar, assuming an absent familiarity, easy boast if I belonged here, but otherwise an unwelcome and hostile gesture. I pause with the first chorus of sharp uptake of breath. There will soon descend a verdict: if I qualify for the prize, if the foreigner has proved himself, if he sullied himself in stains of turmeric enough to earn familiarity. There is a split second of silence before the eruption: it is filled with nothing but the warm blindness that surrounds me. Here I am nobody, unless I announce myself through great feats of magic, like finding a brick on the ground fifteen paces away. If I am nobody, I can't belong, but I am not forced to be a foreigner either. I am renewed into a man freshly arrived at a metropolis that is nonetheless stitched together with the small grime of many lives, and I ask to be included, folded in the midst of their collage of needs and joys.
I am a little more productive now, although not as much as i would like to be... but the gears are grinding along better...
-----
Khichari and Blindfolds
I knew the woman would eventually get me into trouble: she is always pausing to sniff the flowers while I want to rush by, to get safely into a familiar territory where I don't have to answer or question, where, for heaven's sake, I am left alone to brood or simply stare out of the window. Everybody knows her, and therefore everybody wants to know what I am doing in their street, plodding along in the mornings to buy milk and eggs, sitting morosely through the afternoons outside the tea-stall at the end of their alley, scrutinizing them with piercing—if feigned—scholarship, as if categorizing them into pages of a thick volume in my head. Nobody here knows my name, except an aged singer spinster, who has surely forgotten my name or my face. I have nothing to say to the children and shorn widows who instinctively pucker their lips and squint when they look at me, not knowing quite what to make of my presence in the alley where they empty their spittoons or throw their cricket balls.
Now the woman has got me into trouble: instead of demurring and closing the door behind her, she has laughed with the thirteen-year old boy who has organized the puja, and disappeared just around the corner for a bowl of khichari. I follow her with bags full of grocery: eggplants, eggs, pumpkin flowers, two hundred grams of Rohu fish, three tomatoes, a bag of muesli. She comes around the corner, a leaf-bowl duno full of spicy khichari in her hands, the idol of Saraswati still smiling two full days after her puja. I have no choice but to venture around the corner.
I have so far avoided this corner, barely ten paces beyond the door into which I daily disappear, or from which I reemerge into the community's realm that is the thin, eternally disturbed, incessantly dug-up, cat-strewn, widow-watched alley. I do not know where the road leads in that direction: there is no tea-stall or ration-store around that corner, I am certain of that. But that doesn't preclude the possibility of there waiting for me a charming lane with overflowing window-boxes of bougainvillea, or a particularly attractive window that lets waft the soft strains of music sweet to the ears and calls out a comely woman or two who will smile at me before closing the window, flicking on the switch to a chamber where cultural confusion flits in a blood-mingling flea-dance of seduction, and where I am rendered incapable of deciding if that was withdrawal or invitation, if she lowered her eyes to close me out or to draw me in with her lashes.
The boy grins as he brings me a bowl of khichari, as a part of the puja celebrations. This is a city run by communists—the longest elected communist government in the world, I am reminded by its citizens whenever the opportunity arises, which is very often, once they come to know I hail from the principality of Prachanda Dahal. Yet, their pujas drag on forever: even Kumar, Shiva's other son largely forgotten in Nepal, has his own puja, and it is sobering to remember that I have seen him only as an enamelled relief on the western gate to Pashupatinath temple, where I take my visiting non-Hindu friends to appreciate the golden shape of Nandi's giant testicles as he squats facing east. Like Nandi's golden frame, the steaming duno of khichari is warm and golden. I am too hungry to protest. I dig into the wallet for the woman's visiting card to eat the khichari, but she is a wild woman with her own ideas about loyalty and integrity: she insists that I imitate her, eat with my fingers coated black in Kolkata-grime, tasting first the smoke and salt of a sick city, then the khichari spices.
I am furious. I am the incarnation of Rudra himself, but only for about ten seconds. The spicy khichari tastes of turmeric and chillies more than anything, but it also a comfort food that caresses the mind in its most infantile corners: it is glorified dal-bhat, it assures across a gulf of unfamiliarity, it melts foreignness into friendliness.
Then they blindfold me and give me a stick. Fifteen paces away is a single brick on the asphalt. I am to find my way to the brick after being spun around a couple of times: to strike a grounded piñata, to toe and stumble towards an unseen goal, and reaching it, to announce my arrival with a savage blow. In the blindness, in the strict binding of my vision, I realize how much I am an outsider, and for that reason alone, how much a spectacle, how much welcome as a comic relief, which must be, I insist in the moment, the first invitation towards acceptance. I am good at throwing darts, I remind myself, as if that means anything at all, except that it recalls another moment long ago in a friend's friends' basement where I had to stand alongside another woman, a friend again, proving that I was no simple foreign freak, but a man of quirks and romance.
There are small, rodent snickers from children and gruff laughs from men and sighs and coughs that serve as the language of women in this city as I walk aslant towards the goal. I walk into the mounds on either side of the alley, correcting the map in my mind, flexing my foot in subtle degrees. I am blind. There is an audience outside of me, whose faces I can't reconstruct because I have not taken the time to know them, watching me, waiting for me to stumble and plant my face into the asphalt. I give up on the goal, but I know it is important to persist until a conclusion is announced. I step forward.
Until I reach and toe the brick, very slightly, as if testing its verity, as if checking the intention of those that watch me. There is nothing more to do but to wait for the trumpet of arrival. I do not want to strike the brick—that registers as mildly vulgar, assuming an absent familiarity, easy boast if I belonged here, but otherwise an unwelcome and hostile gesture. I pause with the first chorus of sharp uptake of breath. There will soon descend a verdict: if I qualify for the prize, if the foreigner has proved himself, if he sullied himself in stains of turmeric enough to earn familiarity. There is a split second of silence before the eruption: it is filled with nothing but the warm blindness that surrounds me. Here I am nobody, unless I announce myself through great feats of magic, like finding a brick on the ground fifteen paces away. If I am nobody, I can't belong, but I am not forced to be a foreigner either. I am renewed into a man freshly arrived at a metropolis that is nonetheless stitched together with the small grime of many lives, and I ask to be included, folded in the midst of their collage of needs and joys.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Spring Comes Stealing
This was published in the TKP on Sunday, Feb 1.
Later today, perhaps another long post about Kolkata.
-----
Spring comes stealing
The marshlands on which the city of Kolkata is raised experience a sudden withdrawal of winter, as if the fog tires of fighting for an etymological victory over the city's persistent smog, as if gradation is an unsolvable puzzle, as if there is no intermission between shivering and sweltering. There is no graceful exit, like birds take flight away from their winter habitat or deep-buried habits of hibernation thaw to a new tickle of sun: the sellers and mongers, the Babus and their horde of waddling housewives, the intensity and anger in the eyes of bus-drivers and rickshaw-pullers all persist, as permanent as the urine soaked sides of roads, the black-as-Kali's-wrath feet of Kolkata's denizen, the mildly stinging foam of smoke belched by union-backed two-stroke engines, and the destitution of gap-toothed two-rupees tea-sellers. Still, spring comes stealing to Kolkata and brings a burst of color that comforts the mind.
In this renewed garden, the eye becomes a small animal under the watch of an amused archer. It darts from one refuge to another, avoiding exposure to the colour of new hibiscus or old marigold turning crimson in its heart. But the eye is a bucket by nature, forced to scoop, and take account, of all sights new, all minute flicker of light and shade, so it labours under the slow torture of notice. It is, more than any other sensory organ, attuned to the acquisition of new knowledge. To it is given the concave surface where the greatest of all binary finds its playground: light and shade. And this idea shapes itself best on the facets, the lulling curves and pointing juts on the clay body of a Saraswoti being shaped by loving hands.
It takes colour from a new Gujarati Kotha sari a housewife decides to wear for the big day of puja, and it takes the colours of the bougainvillea she waters in the morning to invite vitality to the narrow strip of sun on her balcony. The eye watches as spring takes colour from the fresh-eggs gut of rohu fish in the market. Spring takes colour from the new date syrup for the city's sweets, and from the first peek of sun finally victorious over winter, and awakens in the eyes of the people slowly waddling to a chowk where Kumhars practice their art of building idols for each season's festivities.
The Kumhars, or clay-players, start early for each appointed date, perennially labouring, twisting dampened straw over a crude bamboo frame, rubbing over the shapes a clay and lime paste, using weeks to realize one form, like the incisive, derivative, meditative shape of learning any new idea. Because their shapes are applied with too much precision, they can't be kilned: fire is too harsh a judgement for any delicate idol. Ornaments, earlobes, meaningful curls of the lips and decorative nipples are added by hand as idlers stand to watch, drawing on their slow-smoking beedis, leaning on the handles of their long spades as they dig up the roads to change water mains, or to repair a road that never needed alteration, but the government being communist, unemployment finds a ready solution in the sunny prospect of digging aimlessly, endlessly, over any exposed public land, until the rains come chasing.
Not the Kumhars: their labours have nothing to do with ideology, or any other corruptible chain of human logic, but pertain to the skein that connects seasonal wisdom of sleep to its subsequent burst of awakening. They add one fresh colour each day to finished idols: red alta ring around the feet on Monday, black pupil of eyes on Tuesday, crushed-bougainvillea pink for the mouth on Wednesday, ochre blouse on Thursday, yellow silk for a sari on Friday. On Saturday, her swan gets its black-dotted yellow beaks, and silver strands strum to evoke the shellac-red veena in Saraswoti's hands.
And so spring comes stealing to the land, amplified in the swing and grunt of day labourers grateful for the mild clime. New flowers garland idols of Kali, and everybody smiles in the anticipation of puja that brings freshness to their demeanor. Lovers fight again in the streets, whispering urgently in rapid-fire Bangla, slapping away a hand that reaches for another. Fishmongers abandon their stalls to appreciate new shades in lilies and peonies, children clamber over tea-stalls to collect an unanticipated harvest of what looks like cherry blossoms. Each teeming window-box or balcony rivals every other in the uniqueness of its own bougainvillea.
All of this is witnessed by a Saraswoti who is assembled in parts over a long time and kept in the moist shade of a veil, an ancient woman of grace who learns each season the very lessons she teaches the world: to create, with effort and affection, to keep faith in creativity and new knowledge, to persist in the task. She allows Kumhars to create her every year, to be celebrated for a day, after which she is abandoned under trees or in the waters of Ganga: which of her disciples has escaped the same fate? Create. Persist in the effort. Give to the world a few new ideas to cherish. Then wither and return to the eternal void, just like the spring that comes stealing, then withers into parched soil and flowers that wilt in the mid-morning sun.
Later today, perhaps another long post about Kolkata.
-----
Spring comes stealing
The marshlands on which the city of Kolkata is raised experience a sudden withdrawal of winter, as if the fog tires of fighting for an etymological victory over the city's persistent smog, as if gradation is an unsolvable puzzle, as if there is no intermission between shivering and sweltering. There is no graceful exit, like birds take flight away from their winter habitat or deep-buried habits of hibernation thaw to a new tickle of sun: the sellers and mongers, the Babus and their horde of waddling housewives, the intensity and anger in the eyes of bus-drivers and rickshaw-pullers all persist, as permanent as the urine soaked sides of roads, the black-as-Kali's-wrath feet of Kolkata's denizen, the mildly stinging foam of smoke belched by union-backed two-stroke engines, and the destitution of gap-toothed two-rupees tea-sellers. Still, spring comes stealing to Kolkata and brings a burst of color that comforts the mind.
In this renewed garden, the eye becomes a small animal under the watch of an amused archer. It darts from one refuge to another, avoiding exposure to the colour of new hibiscus or old marigold turning crimson in its heart. But the eye is a bucket by nature, forced to scoop, and take account, of all sights new, all minute flicker of light and shade, so it labours under the slow torture of notice. It is, more than any other sensory organ, attuned to the acquisition of new knowledge. To it is given the concave surface where the greatest of all binary finds its playground: light and shade. And this idea shapes itself best on the facets, the lulling curves and pointing juts on the clay body of a Saraswoti being shaped by loving hands.
It takes colour from a new Gujarati Kotha sari a housewife decides to wear for the big day of puja, and it takes the colours of the bougainvillea she waters in the morning to invite vitality to the narrow strip of sun on her balcony. The eye watches as spring takes colour from the fresh-eggs gut of rohu fish in the market. Spring takes colour from the new date syrup for the city's sweets, and from the first peek of sun finally victorious over winter, and awakens in the eyes of the people slowly waddling to a chowk where Kumhars practice their art of building idols for each season's festivities.
The Kumhars, or clay-players, start early for each appointed date, perennially labouring, twisting dampened straw over a crude bamboo frame, rubbing over the shapes a clay and lime paste, using weeks to realize one form, like the incisive, derivative, meditative shape of learning any new idea. Because their shapes are applied with too much precision, they can't be kilned: fire is too harsh a judgement for any delicate idol. Ornaments, earlobes, meaningful curls of the lips and decorative nipples are added by hand as idlers stand to watch, drawing on their slow-smoking beedis, leaning on the handles of their long spades as they dig up the roads to change water mains, or to repair a road that never needed alteration, but the government being communist, unemployment finds a ready solution in the sunny prospect of digging aimlessly, endlessly, over any exposed public land, until the rains come chasing.
Not the Kumhars: their labours have nothing to do with ideology, or any other corruptible chain of human logic, but pertain to the skein that connects seasonal wisdom of sleep to its subsequent burst of awakening. They add one fresh colour each day to finished idols: red alta ring around the feet on Monday, black pupil of eyes on Tuesday, crushed-bougainvillea pink for the mouth on Wednesday, ochre blouse on Thursday, yellow silk for a sari on Friday. On Saturday, her swan gets its black-dotted yellow beaks, and silver strands strum to evoke the shellac-red veena in Saraswoti's hands.
And so spring comes stealing to the land, amplified in the swing and grunt of day labourers grateful for the mild clime. New flowers garland idols of Kali, and everybody smiles in the anticipation of puja that brings freshness to their demeanor. Lovers fight again in the streets, whispering urgently in rapid-fire Bangla, slapping away a hand that reaches for another. Fishmongers abandon their stalls to appreciate new shades in lilies and peonies, children clamber over tea-stalls to collect an unanticipated harvest of what looks like cherry blossoms. Each teeming window-box or balcony rivals every other in the uniqueness of its own bougainvillea.
All of this is witnessed by a Saraswoti who is assembled in parts over a long time and kept in the moist shade of a veil, an ancient woman of grace who learns each season the very lessons she teaches the world: to create, with effort and affection, to keep faith in creativity and new knowledge, to persist in the task. She allows Kumhars to create her every year, to be celebrated for a day, after which she is abandoned under trees or in the waters of Ganga: which of her disciples has escaped the same fate? Create. Persist in the effort. Give to the world a few new ideas to cherish. Then wither and return to the eternal void, just like the spring that comes stealing, then withers into parched soil and flowers that wilt in the mid-morning sun.
Cough! Cough!
Cough! Cough!
A little sick, body, mind. Of the city, of the story, of getting around. Going to market to buy vegetables and fish.
Made fish yesterday, way too creative [!] with the recipe for it to remain palatable.
Old Monk is coming over tonight for a talk.
Will possibly post again later in the day, after finish writing TKP post.
A little sick, body, mind. Of the city, of the story, of getting around. Going to market to buy vegetables and fish.
Made fish yesterday, way too creative [!] with the recipe for it to remain palatable.
Old Monk is coming over tonight for a talk.
Will possibly post again later in the day, after finish writing TKP post.
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