Bombay thali

A jab of tastes at Samrat Restaurant in Bombay jolted me into realizing that I am in India again. Nostalgia crowded the table as we ate. Around six years back, when I was at TIFR Bombay for a month, my parents had visited me and I had taken them out to Samrat. Gujrati thali. One of the five best meals I have ever had.
If my neuronal axons are aqueducts, then a spurt of colors flooded them again in the same way they did years back. Can one relive an experience? I didn’t think it would be possible. Leena’s and M’s first thali experience.
We arrived in Bombay late last night. Lucky to have friends at Malabar Hill to put us up! A beautiful condo on the fourth floor, looking on the bay and the Bombay skyline. A cool breeze teased my jet-lagged morning disorientation. On second read, I like the word disorient. Don’t know the Orient? You might be disoriented.

In one morning we managed to squeeze in some shopping. Leena and M bought a few salwar kameez from a cool store called Fabindia at Kalaghora. The saturated colors look good on them. The cotton and silk fabric. I really wanted to buy a aquamarine blue silk shirt but resisted the temptation. Feeling silk between your fingertips is like the melting of a truffle held between your tongue and palate. Adaptation of senses to the first spike of such an experience is paradise lost! The book Stubmbling on Happiness argues that we have rather poor memory of feelings. I wish we could delete certain memories immediately–like feeling raw silk in your fingers–so that their nascency could be recreated.

In a way, stepping out of that flight and walking into India is such a re-run. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, and surprises the senses in ways that toss between expectation and embarrassment. The old Indian air assaults the nostrils. I expected as much but was embarassed to sense it. You are not supposed to sense it, dictated the brain. Remember, it said, you were born with it. You can’t be like Jean-Baptiste Grenoullie in Perfume distraught on discovering that you cannot detect your smell. Because you should have had adapted to it. Only western tourists are supposed to whine about that heavy pungent syrupy smell in Indian air. The edge in it. The saturation of it with that thousand-year old grime of plebian ennui, and that indomitable din of uncommon joys.

We went for a walk at the garden in Malabar Hill. Offers a lovely view of the Bombay horizon. On a drive through Queen’s necklace with our local host, Aunty N, we stopped by at fresh sugarcane juice vendor by the street that she knew. I was very proud of Leena and M for not being afraid to try a glass! My brave American family! Better get their body adjusted to the tropical microbial ecosystem that has little to do with hygiene.

I feel so sleepy now that my entire body is begging me to lay down. The rich colors of garments keep appearing in front of my eyes like an apparition. The roads are alive across from the verandah. They are casting a spell on me. My camera wants to click away. I sense that uneasy stomach wrenching invitation of the ephemeral.

How reluctantly the bee emerges
From the depths of pistils of the peony!

~ Basho

Preparing to leave for India

We are preparing to leave for India. You know how you feel when you pick up a book you always wanted to read, settle down by a quiet window, and smell the pages as you tease your eyes over the preface? I always have that eerie sense of triumph when I prepare to go home. The chapters of this book are interspersed with long silences—once a year I get to feel what a boy feels nearing summer vacation.

This is Leena’s first visit to India.  I will see India through her dreamy blue eyes. Taste that golguppa on the streets of Bombay with the same sense of suspended trepidation. Possibly be amused at her coveting one salwar kameez or another.  This is how one touches that common weft and warp that make us—call it what you may. We are in our expressions of wonder.

It’s snowy outside. I am dreaming of the sun.

My father tells me that the house has been repainted for the celebrations. Our sisutree had to be trimmed. A tropical tree in a small plot of land is not an ideal companion. It loves to spread out, cast that bewitching spell of cool breeze, and simply take over. I had planted it many years back. I wanted something wild and untamed in our garden. While I have been away from my homeland, the tree has send his roots far and wide. I like to think of him as my brother. Our ways are different, but we are both watered by the same clouds.

Teachers

I was browsing through a periodical my mother subscribes to; ‘Sadhan path’. Sadhana is a difficult word to translate into English, in Zen the analogous word would be zazen, in Sufism it is dhikr, in Christianity the closest phrase that convey an equivalent meaning (that I found in my rather limited study) is ‘Practice in the Presence of God’, which is borrowed from a book by that name  written by the saint Brother Lawrence. Sadhana is code word that condenses a spiritual idea. Anyway, Sadhan path roughly translates to ‘the way of action/meditation/devotion’.

A very interesting article in this periodical impellled me to refresh my memory on a curious story from the Indian spiritual epic, Srimad Bhagavatam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavata_Purana). In this story, when asked my King Yadu, Sri Dattatreya (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dattatreya) list his twenty-four gurus (masters).  Who are his teachers? I find his list fascinating. Contrary to tradition, he doesn’t name a saint or enlightened being. His list: Earth, Air, Sky, Water, Fire, Moon, Sun, Pigeon, Python, Ocean, Moth, Honey bee, Elephant, Honey-maker, Deer, Fish, Prostitute, Hawk, Child, Young girl, Arrow-maker, Snake, Spider and Wasp.

Impressive list, right? Each of them comes with a story and why they are his teacher. I won’t go into that because in the periodical I was mentioning there is another story from another epic, The Mahabharata, where King Yudhisthir’s conversation with the great Bhisma on the later’s death bed references the list of teachers a saint Bodhya gave to King Yayati. Apparently, the Kings in those days were seeking the advise of saints and sages quite often,  is it credible that politics wasn’t always as vile an influence on an individual as today’s world makes us believe? I take that back. Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Cicero were all (apparently) wise politicians, though Seneca credibility in putting his precepts to practice is quite controversial. Anyway, I digress. The list that Bodhya gave is just six, a subset of the list of twenty-four. I found the stories rather enthralling, and here is a brief account—

1. Prostitute: In the old city of Mithila there lived a beautiful and vivacious prostitute. In the desire to earn a lot of money she would try to entice men of noble descent every night.  But one light she waited and waited and no one came to his door. She felt an overwhelming sense of renunciation on that night of  dejection, and consoling herself with the thought that this is how life is and it’s true worth is in desiring the Ultimate Lover (God), she consoled herself to bed. She is my teacher, said Bodhya, because by giving up the frustration from not obtaining material wealth, she could sleep well. That is the source of peace.
2. Hawk: A hawk was flying with a  piece of flesh held in its beaks and a flock of hawks followed trying to snatch it from him. They fought and wounded the hawk with their beaks. Only on letting go of the piece of flesh did he survive. It is my teacher, said Bodhya, because by giving up greed and attachment to objects one can be peaceful.
3. Snake: A snake is always aware, always dynamic and always alone. It is quiet unless disturbed. It never makes a home but finds a burrow to live. It is my teacher, said Bodhya, because by not making a home and having few material possessions and being peripatetic, a seeker can live peacefully.
4. Chaataka bird: A chataka bird never kills other living beings for food, and only drinks from rain. Likewise, by eating a drinking with purity and non-violence one can soar high.
5. Arrow-maker: The story goes that an arrow-maker was so immersed in making his arrows and sharpening the arrow-head that he didn’t even notice the king, his employer and master, pass by his hut with an entire army! From him, said Bodya, I learn the power of concentration on the work at hand, and to fully apply oneself in ones action.
6. Young girl: The story goes that a young girl, in the absence of any of the family members, became responsible to serve food to unexpected guests. There was no rice at home and she had to thresh rice-grains. But as she was threshing, her bangles were tingling loudly, and being a shy girl and not wanting the guests to know that she had no rice ready to serve, she removed most of her bangles except two on each wrist. They still made a sound! Finally she removed all but one. Said Bodya, in the company of many there is always noise and chatter. I learned from this story that spending time alone, like that lone bangle on the girls wirst, is peaceful.

Curious stories!

Four days

“Umredraj se mangke laye the chardin

Do Aarjume kat gaye, do intejaar me” ~ Bahadur Shah Jafar

“I had pleaded for four days (of life)  from God, two were spent in desiring, (the other) two in waiting.”

“Bal bikharte tuti kabronpe
Jaab koyi mehejabeen roti hai

Mukjhko afsar khayal aata hai

mout kitni hasin hoti hai” ~ Unknown

“(Laying) beside a damaged grave, when a beautiful lady cries letting her hair loose,  the thought crosses my mind that instance; Oh! How beautiful is death!”

“Apni khushi na aye, na apni khushi chale,
lai hayat aye, kaajaa le chali chale” ~ Momin

“(I) Haven’t come here (in this world) on my own will, nor will leave it on my own will. Life has brought me here, I came, death will take me away, I will go.”

“Meri akhon me ashuu tujse humdum kiya kahun kiya hai,
thahar jaye to angaaraa hai, bahe jaye to paani hai” ~ Fanee

“How will I explain to you, love, what tears (of separation)  in my eyes are, when they wait in my eyes they are like fire, when they flow they are just water. “

“Bhnmar se ladro, tund laheron se uljhoo,
kahan tak chaloge kinare kinare?” ~ Raja Hamdani

“Fight against the tornado, grapple against the tumultuous waves, how long will you travel close to the shore?”

“Gayi thi kahke layegee julfe yar ki buphiri to badesba ka dimag bhi na mila” ~ Jalal

“On the way to you, (this) breeze told me he will bring back the fragrance of the locks in your hair, on the way back, he was so vain (for being so fragrant) he ignored me!”

Oh, the beauty of Urdu poetry! Going through my bookshelf at home, I rediscovered a little collection of Bengali translations of Urdu shayeree (couplets and lyrical poems) that I recall having relished reading over and over again in my teenage years.  The inner page reads in Bengali, “On your first anniversary, a little token of love from your brother” and dedicated to my mother. I always find poetry to be an unique window into a culture, a language and a race. In poetry one can be unabashedly intimate, emotional, ambivalent, tormented and philosophical. This literary form concedes to such a spectrum of expression and thought! Poetic abstraction necessarily commands the nuances of the language and devises new allegories from cultural and regional references. Poetry’s  strong oral tradition also adds to it’s tremendous appeal.

Many elements of Urdu poetry is very difficult to translate— a feature certainly not unique to the language. However, a mood of romantic melancholy and playfulness,  self-indulgence in idealism and romanticism; a mood torn between separation and union, persistence and resignation, fatalism and activism is predominant in Urdu poetry. And like a lot of poetic traditions in the Indian subcontinent, its romanticism is saturated with a sense of the ephemeral and the ennobling of Love’s joy and suffering into a spiritual quest. This alchemy of an apparently futile human quest of feeling and expressing into an eternal longing for the Divine is quintessential in Urdu poetry. In poems where the Divine is not recognized,  Fate, and her incomprehensibility of intentions, becomes a proxy. I think the Unknown is always in the cast and plays a lead-role.

Here is a translation of a poem by Faiz Ahemed Faiz (read about him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faiz_Ahmed_Faiz) by Naomi Lazard. I have the Bengali translation of this poem translated by Amitav Dasgupta, amazing that the same poem can have such diverse appeal in different translations!

The day death comes

How will it be, the day death comes?
Perhaps like the gift at the beginning of night,
the first kiss on the lips given unasked,
the kiss that opens the way to brilliant worlds
while, in the distance, an April of nameless flowers

agitates the moon’s heart.

Perhaps in this way: when the morning,
green with unopened buds, begins to shimmer
in the bedroom of the beloved,
and the tinkle of stars as they rush to depart
can be heard on the silent windows.

What will it be like, the day death comes?
Perhaps like a vein screaming
with the premonition of pain
under the edge of a knife, while a shadow,
the assassin holding the knife,
spreads out with a wingspan
from one end of the world to the other.

No matter when death comes, or how,
even though in the guise of the disdainful beloved
who is always cold,
there will be the same words of farewell to the heart:
“Thank God it is finished, the night of the broken-hearted.
Praise be to the meeting of lips,
the honeyed lips I have known.”

(Translated by Naomi Lazard)

Home

Sunlight filters through the dusty leaves of coconut disheveled by Phalgun breeze. The guava tree is leaning away from the hot brick wall of our home here at Siliguri. Phalgun brings in celebration of spring in India. Holi, the festival of colors, is day after tomorrow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holi) . In Shantiniketan (http://www.santiniketan.com/), the university founded by Rabindranath Tagore, Holi is celebrated with panache as the Vasant Utsav (Spring festival). Drama, dance, singing and poetry recitations and other cultural activities animate their celebration. The soil in this part of West Bengal is very red and the summers are singeing hot. I have never been to Shantiniketan, but I have been to parts of Birbhum district within which Shantiniketan is located.  The rich green foliage of Bengal countryside contrasts strongly with the soil color there. When it rains the gullies become bright red, as if the bricks of old temples have melted and their blood-steeped history has mixed with the melancholy of long monsoons.

I have been cooking every meal since returning home. Today, at lunch, I was feeling the spell of cool spring  afternoons intoxicate my mind. The curtains are rippling in the breeze. A faint clamor of hammer on metal from the blacksmith down the road is keeping the afternoon marginally awake. The peddlers on the streets have retired. The sissu tree in our yard languidly warps her shadow over a stretch of the narrow lane outside. Tired rickshaw-pullers pause to rest. Girls and boys returning from school loiter and chatter. The horns of motorbikes and auto-rickshaws are less frequent now.  Some shop-owners have returned home briefly from bazaar for lunch, either closing their shops only to open up again later in the afternoon, or leaving the slim midday sales on apprentices and servants.  The local grocer is dozing off on his cane-chair and the packaged-milk store on the other corner of the road is shut after selling out on their morning stock. Nirmala Mishra is singing a melancholic song on the radio, “Ooo tota pakhi re, shikhal khule…”, here is a rough translation,

“Oh, Tota bird, I will let you fly free, if you bring me back my mother, if you bring me back my mother. I was fast asleep on her lap, who knows when she left and went away, everyone says she is lost in the skies… to find her out.

Other say that she is in the blossoms of the morning champa flowers, and she plucks them for her morning puja and comes to the alter… “

What a song, if only the ethos could be translated! The concept of Mother, both the physical and the ethereal, has such a nuanced influence on the Bengali psyche, culture and literature. How sweet is this idea that God, the eternal Mother, is as eager to find her child (the devotee) as the child is in finding her! This separation is only temporary, as if the Mother has left us for a moment to take care of household chores, and in the meantime we have been in trouble, may be singed a finger, and whimpering for her. She is going to come and pick us up. She certainly will! Because she is a Mother! The smarting of that singed finger is neither sin nor suffering but just a childish mischief.

Many birds visit the Cinnamon tree at our home. It’s flowering season is nearing and the inflorescence of small creamy-white flowers bears a very sweet fragrance. In our neighborhood, houses are not too close to each other and though there isn’t a plenty of yard space, every house has a few shady trees and flowering plants. Our neighbor in front has a wonderful creeper over their gate that blossoms in spring with pinkish flowers (madhabi lata) and a very strong fragrance that drives insects mad!  This flower features in many of Tagore poems. We have a Kamini plant, it’s little white flowers are very fragrant. And in Autumn, right around the time of Durga puja our shefali (Bengal jasmine) shrub strewns the grass with little offerings of white-petal-saffron-stalked flowers. And who doesn’t know how extolled jasmine is in Indian poetry right from the age of VedaVyas and Kalidas?

You see, home is like a island you discovered, and after long explorations you return to find that the island, however small, is like no other port or city or kingdom, because  your ship however tall and white and gilded, is dwarfed by her old drooping weathered trees and her red glistening inviting sand. Her wood has matching grain.

March 3rd, 2009

Some of you may know about the the Pink Chaddi Campaign aginst Sri Ram Sena founder Pramod Muthalik (see for example, http://www.thepinkchaddicampaign.blogspot.com/ and the Facebook group, ‘A Consortium of Pub-going, Loose & Forward Women’). Going around in Calcutta I was amused to sight the related Amul ad, `Pink Chaddi Yellow Buddy’ and ‘Pub tu toh gaya!’ (see, http://www.amul.com/2008hits/page17.html). Amul, for those of you who haven’t grown up in India, is the most popular brand in milk products.  I cannot name a single other butter brand in India besides Amul butter.

One morning I strolled into a Barista caffe ( http://www.barista.co.in/) in Kolkata and paid enough money for a cup of cafe mocha to buy two decent meals in Kolkata. I was curious about these new swanky cafes with an unmistakable Western ambiance. The contrast is sharp. I am still used to drinking milk-tea in clay-cups from little tea-stall on the sidewalk at four rupees. And here I paid eighty rupees fora cup of coffee! Granted, it was good coffee, but the price feels undeniably sinful. Sitting at a table that morning I noticed an ad across the street that made me chuckle, “Valentine’s Day Special, Ayurvedic Facial for… “. That would surely vex  Sri Ram Sena, Valentine’s day and Ayurveda? Or may be they will find some consolation? That morning, I must have been in a rather odd mood. When I walked up to the counter to order my coffee, the server didn’t respond to my Bengali. I spoke in English and placed my order, but then realized from his name-tag that he was a Bengali. I was irked.  Why won’t he respond in Bengali when spoken to?  I confronted him in Bengali and asked him whether he knew the language. Of course he did. Because Barista was an Italian company the staff was directed to speak in English, he said. I was not willing to give up so easily. What is this strange obsession with English as the language of the elite and nobility even after fifty years of India’s independence? When will we begin to appreciate that a language is just a language and cannot be a symbol of superiority or inferiority? And when will we learn to love what is our own as much as what we absorb from other cultures? I ended up submitting a suggestion card and expressing my views.  I also tried to convince the server that there is nothing intrinsically noble about replying in English when spoken to in Bengali and pretending he doesn’t know the language.  And when he mumbled something like,  ‘Oh, but this is an Italian company’, I snapped, ‘Have you been to Italy? Do you think the Italians would much rather speak in English with a fellow Italian? And what does it matter what company it is? You are in Kolkata, aren’t you? You are a Bengali, who, under a little persuasion is speaking the language as good as any native speaker should. So why subscribe to this idea, that somehow, speaking is English is high-class?’  This is a trend in India, and particularly West Bengal. We don’t value our language and culture enough. N.C. Chowdhuri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirad_C._Chaudhuri), a great scholar who lived mostly in Oxford, wrote a notorious book, ‘Atmaghati Bangalee’ (Suicidal Bengali). I think the name is very apt.

Anyway, that morning was brightened by another discovery, a exclusive bookstore of Motilal Banarsidass (http://www.mlbd.com/)  on Camac Street! This publisher is probably the largest on Indology in the world, and for me it is cady store. An impressive collection of spiritual and Eastern philosophy books, some dusty and pale for long day of waiting to be touched and felt by a passing reader, greeted me on the stacks. There were books on Buddhism, non-dualistism (Atdvaita), Qualified non-dualism (vishitatdvaita) , Tantra, Kashmiri Shaivism, Zen, work of modern saints like Ramana Maharishi, Nishswargadatta Maharaj and so on. I bought a very interesting book on non-dual Kasmiri Shaivism, ‘Paramartha Sara (The Essential Truth)’ by Abhigyanagupta.

Coming back to ads, the Indian government has a catchy series of AIDS and HIV awareness ads which features Buladi in West Bengal (http://www.telegraphindia.com/1041221/asp/atleisure/story_4152103.asp). These ads are just everywhere in Kolkata now!  ‘Have a single sexual partner or the demon of  AIDS may destroy you!’ one says.  On the noisy polluted jammed roads in Calcutta, squeezed between people on buses, I was eagerly eying the cityscape whenever I could. Lots of ads by jewelery and Saree brands. Their appetite for ornaments and fabric seems to be a defining characteristic of Bengali women! The concept of obeying traffic rules is somewhat alien here. Lots of ads on such matters. One reads, ‘Treating traffic lights as decorative lighting? Have you gotten it right?’. ‘Please obey traffic rules’ is printed on the backs of buses and trucks. Not much effect is obvious. Traffic mayhem fails to quite capture the state of affairs here.

I like the street names in Kolkta, though lot of them have been changed after independence, but some of the old names still circulate. There is Harrison Road, Amherst street and so on… I was passing by Hindu college and remembered Derozio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Vivian_Derozio).   You must read about him and here is lovely thought expressed simply in one of his poems,

“That, cold and lifeless as they seem,

The flowers, the stars, the sky

Have more than common minds may deem

To stir our sympathy.

Oh! in such moments can I crush

The grass beneath my feet?

Ah no; the grass has then a voice,

Its heart — I hear it beat.”

Surely, he had lived in a different Kolkata.

February 28th, 2009

When my grandmother was married off to my grandfather she was twelve years old and he was twenty two. My young grandfather was a fresh diploma in civil engineering at that time.  My great grandfather, like my grandfather, was married to wealth, and my great grandmother had remained rather conscious of her social status and affluence. She wasn’t shy of reminding it to others. After all, her father was a jamindar (landlord) and in the latter half of the nineteenth century owned a couple of mango-orchards, a few hundred acres of the fertile paddy land and the only two-storied bungalow in the district. Naturally, her dominance─ in the capacity of a woman in a joint-family of the father-in-law’s─ was earned by a power that few Indian in colonized India could ignore, the power of owning land. This power, unusual for women in those days, extended over her son and the story goes that she had little faith in her daughter-in-law when she first arrived at the age of fifteen to live with her husband. After a year my great grandmother expressed doubt on the fertility of my grandmother. A year had passed by and her daughter-in-law had reached the very ripe age of sixteen and no grandchildren in sight? She must be barren. She expressed the wish to get her son remarried. His son resisted. The in-laws came pleading to her, the daughter-in-law’s father implored that six more months’ time be granted to my grandmother to prove herself! The urgency of purpose was impressed upon her young mind. The ‘thorn of a step-wife’ was to be fended off. Her father, himself of affluent means, summoned a priest who performed a ritual and instructed my grandmother to undergo a period of penance. She also promised homage to the deity. In six months, timely enough to thwart her mother-in-law’s plan, my grandmother was on the family way. In due course, she gave birth to my aunt. My aunt’s hair was not trimmed and she remained on a strict vegetarian diet until the age of five. That was to appease the deity, besides a little blood from a nick on the chest of my grandmother presented on a banyan leaf. The deity must have been elated for my grandmother never quite looked back after that, in the next twenty six years she would go on to produce thirteen children, ten of whom would survive childhood. She took the insult ‘barren’ rather too seriously.

My great-grandmother however never quite overcame the spell of finding fault with my grandma. Perhaps, the loss of her territory of daughter-in-laws to rule over, along with that blessing of the deity that seem to jeer at her every other year in the form of a child’s barley-cuddly-milky face, made her a bit deranged in her later days. The insult of the gods could not have struck harder on her. After many years, when my father would visit her, she would whoosh away monkeys and crows and stray-cats from the kitchen with curses that unequivocally referred to her daughter-in-law, and comparisons would often be drawn between the features of an old male cat and my grandma. She loved her son a lot. She continued living in the family home built by my great-great-great grandfather while her son lived in different places in the foothills in Bengal. He was working in a colliery as a mining overseer after a job in the post office and Public Development Works (PWD). The hills suited him well. The hilly cows produced plenty of milk and the kitchen at such a huge family’s home had a coal-oven always lit. After all, coal from the colliery was cheap for the overseer. A huge iron wok would be boiling with milk. The cream of the milk would form a thick layer and later skimmed to be made into ghee. My grandmother would make rasgollas, chaanar jalebi, sandesh from the chaana (coagulated milk). Her fingers were soft, creamy and white from all that whipping and rolling and beating and flattening and sieving. Her rasgollas (chaana nuggets boiled in syrup) had a little bit of khoya inside it that melted and made these fluffy delights that my eldest aunt confesses she never could recreate. Those rasgollas are forever trapped in the memory of my uncles and aunts, always wanting to emulate and never managing to. Or maybe there is a delight in deification. My eldest aunt, being the first child to lift the ‘curse of infertility’, was a pampered child. Whenever my grandmother scolded her, my grandmother’s father would intervene. Remember she is the reason you still have ‘rice and sari’, he would say. She always got the a few extra milk-sweets.

I have digressed. Where was I? Yes, my father visiting my great-grandmother. She always missed my grandfather and it was only after my eldest aunt was married and had kids (incidentally one of her kids is older than two of my uncles) did the family move to the paternal land where my great-grandmother lived. Oh, is it you? she would say, squinting her eyes, and straining her ears. Here, why don’t you sit and I will fetch a meat curry I saved for Dibu (my grandfather)? Oh no, my dad would think. And sure enough, in front of him would be something the sight of which caused nausea. One time it was cooked big snails from the garden (of the omnivores in my readership, snails are not eaten in Bengal, and that too garden snails?). Apparently, my great-grandmother would cook and eat, and even serve, palatable food. It was only servings from what was ‘saved for Dibu’ that were grotesque. Another time my grandma had supposedly fetched from a clay pot hung from the ceiling (common way of preserving food in those days) a sweet pickle cooked for Dibu that had ants and insects and putrid mess. The minor problem─ it was cooked three years back. Her memory was playing tricks with her.

One day after taking her morning bath in the river, she had plucked flowers for her puja, made sandal wood paste, collected sacred tulsi (Indian basil) and was walking up a three steps with a bucket of water in one hand. She stood tall to unlatch the door and suddenly felt vertiginous and fell. She was gone in a few minutes. She had never visited a doctor in her old age, and her high blood pressure condition went undetected. They say she died a ‘good death’; even the flowers and sandalwood paste were fresh and waiting. It was morning. No one suffered, including her. Only my father, who was sent packing off  by my grandfather on receiving a cryptic telegram, ‘mother ill, come soon’, missed the marriage ceremony of one of my cousins the whole family was attending. My father did suffer in the overnight train; the curry at the station-stall didn’t suit his stomach.

February 23rd, 2009

A hospital is another planet. Walking through its corridors an inexplicable feeling creeps in. Its air imbued with a curious pungency of disinfectants, antiseptics and deodorizers feel dispassionate and solemn. Yet the many hushed voices keep it engaged; visitors of patients walking in an out with sorrowful faces, the white-apron-clad nurses flipping through a folder that summarizes the state of being of a person into reproducible numbers, like body temperature or red-blood-cell-count or pulse rate. This reduction of life into measurable quantities is, in some respect, bizarrely reassuring. In this planet life is qualified in essentials; “How is your appetite? Do you still have heart-burns from that antibiotic? How is your bowel doing? Are you feeling dizzy standing up? Can you take a few steps on your own?” Each question has a simple answer, each process is a little triumph and is portentous like they never are outside. Outside a hospital our lives are muddled with necessary complacency, our answers become ambivalent and our questions are rarely as disarmingly precise. “How are you?” is weighed by reference to a poorly understood entity, the mind. The rather sharply defined widow of ‘well-being’ inside this planet transitions into a complex pattern of feelings and fulfillments. A pattern we are terribly poor at comprehending.
I was looking down five flights of stairs form the balcony today and wondering about this sense of insulation a hospital can harbor. I always take the stairs to my dad’s cabin. I can feel my aorta throbbing, my breathing becomes a trifle heavier when I run up, I glance at the occasionally opening elevator doors right across the landing of the stairways on every floor and savor a sense of achievement that I took the stairs instead. That I can. It is no small feat in this planet where others may be unable to lift their legs, or breathe without a ventilator or twitch their fingers. At the hall near the stairway, an idol of a Hindu God (Balaji) is decked with flowers and incense sticks. He is worshipped everyday by countless number of well-wishers reciting quick prayers. Tears roll down some cheeks. Some fingers tremble in their folded posture. A art on the floor near the idol shines in the light of ceremonial lamps─ it is a painting of Ganesha, the God with an elephant head, made out of colored rice. A corner of the art is smudged, probably by too enthusiastic devotees. A little sign with an arrow on another corner reads, ‘Muslim Prayer Room’, along with ‘Physiotherapy’ and ‘Pediatrics’. The golden umbrella above the idol hides Him regally from the condescending point of view of where I was stading. Look into my eyes, He seems to suggest. Into the eyes of disease, senility and death. What do you see? If the stones of the stairways could speak, they would be like the Buddha. The end of suffering is in sight, they would whisper. Embrace it unconditionally. Just like you embrace life, birth, rejuvenation. They are back to back against opposite sides of a wall you fail to see through.

No one questions faith here. Probably, no one relies too much on numbers either. The limits of human knowledge are starkly apparent as one walks into the emergency unit; a man just passed away, his relatives broken in grief. I accompanied my dad to the physiotherapy center today. Behind the receptionist’s desk a large painting impresses upon the patients the joy of body dynamics─ a ballet dancer is pirouetting as a copper sun shines in the background. Don’t you appreciate locomotion afresh? I wonder why it had to be a ballet dancer though. Few Indians know anything about ballet, especially because there are so many classical Indian dance forms that have captivated artists in this subcontinent for centuries. I watched my father wobbles across the room holding a walker. I don’t know how he felt watching me walk the first time in my life, could it be comparable? The physiotherapist exercised his legs, folded them at certain angles, stretched them apart and lifted them one at a time in air. Meanwhile a very old lady sitting on a wheelchair was struggling to follow the instructions of her therapist. She was asked to lift her arms maintaining a certain posture. ‘Look at the mirror’, the therapist said, ‘Grandma, look at your fist and lift it straight up over your head’. Another lady was blowing a ball inside a contraption with a tube to blow into. A man with a little hole in his neck looked blankly at the wall while a nurse messaged his arms. A piece of art in mixed medium hung at his corner of the room, a face of a man in relief and toothed-wheels from wrist watches arranged suggestively─ a machine in action, a body that needs ‘oiling’, a mechanism for autonomous movement.

A tiny bookstore right outside the café on the ground floor probably bore testimony to the diversity of feelings a hospital can evoke. It had books about the lives of saints in India, like Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, Yogananda… collection of ‘Tintin’ comics… short story volumes by R. Dahl, O. Henry or Rudyard Kipling… dubious English titles by new-age writers ‘Conversations with God’, ‘Sin, sex and guilt’… collection of Bengali romance short-stories… poems by Buddhadev Bosu, Tasleema Nasrin, Jai Goshwami… many versions of Gita, Mahabharata and Ramayana… a delightful collection of Amar Chitra Katha (Indian comics based on stories from the epics, history and folklore)… guidebooks on pregnancy or bereavement and some on paranormal and psychic subjects. What if you have an out-of-body experience? How to reconcile with visions of the dead? Things like that.

Most of the nurses at the hospital are South Indian and in their twenties. The one attending my father is from Kerala. Big dark eyes, curly black hair and a look of pious simplicity. A trifle tired smile flickers through her face often, and she closes her eyes gently as she listens to the pulse while measuring my father’s blood pressure, looks intently at him while tucking a thermometer under his armpit, as if she tries to gauge the temperature before measuring it. After finishing up she softly sweeps her palm over my father’s bald head and tucks the pillow in. Her smile flashes again, she turns and exclaims, ‘Good! It’s all normal’, and walks out in quick but poised steps. As if the world is waiting and she is listening to its pulse.

There is a Ganesha temple within the premises of the hospital. This is the beauty of India; the sheer diversity of spiritual hope. Choose what you like, pray to a stone or a tree, it doesn’t matter, for the attitude is the goal, not the representation. A young priest comes out and puts a little dot on my forehead of ash and vermilion. Ash: representation of the common residue of the corporeal after cremation. What we all will become finally. Vermilion: representing the Ego that separates us and also propels us, and how it should be touched by the divine before being worn. The brass bell rings and the sweet fragrance of garlands and offering waft in the air. Not everyone might ponder upon the meaning of ash and vermilion. Who knows? Who is to tell what lifts the veil of ignorance from our eyes? These rituals are often fraught with meaning. What an irony that they turn monotonous and meaningless for us and we often reject them as baloney in Rational thought.

On the streets back to the guest-house we are put up Kolkata is another confounding panorama of life. Bustling bazaar with tiny shops cheek to cheek, old wrinkled man in a boxy makeshift old shop on the encroached sidewalk selling puffed rice and savory snacks, deep-fried fritters … another selling garlands for puja (worship)… fruit-stalls, meat-stalls… the sidewalks are packed with people, the roads are distressed and dirty with honking auto-rickshaws and burly buses. A hundred year old house worn out by soot and rain overlooks a narrow street and a little playground. Two temples opposite to the bazaar are noisy with people. Every life at this bazaar, if tracked and documented, would probably be enough material for several novels. The old man for example. He saw the partition of Bengal, I bet. The riots in Kolkata during that time. He might have been a refugee himself. And the perils of the seventies. The promises and betrayal of the eighties, the glimmer of growth in the nineties. The night air is hazy over the yellow street lights as we trudge along. My mind is numb.

February 21st, 2009

The fan is whirring overhead. A dull sound of twittering birds sleepy in the afternoon mixed with the distant pitch of a metal-saw, and the bus conductors shouting the names of the bus-stops filter through the half-open window. There is an occasional thud and clink at the guest-house kitchen downstairs, a ringing of bicycle bells, honking of auto-rickshaws, crowing of crows, ticking of lizards, snoring of my mom. Her sari, hung from the mosquito-net-frame to dry, flutters languidly in the air. Her fingers are in a lax fist as she takes her afternoon nap. A dusty sunny day is exhausted like a yellowing chunk of coarse amber, trapped in a fossilized sheen.
I was trying to take an afternoon siesta. Sunny afternoons retrieve old memories, some experiential, others fictional. Literature can create such vivid images in your mind that they sometimes inform your real memories─ not of events but notions of events. How do you remember sunny afternoons, or swims in lakes or sunsets or stale puffed rice? In this conceptual abstraction I think we tend to integrate fantasy and reality. Sunny afternoons in India make me feel a particular way because there were long summer days of vacation from school when falling asleep with a favorite novel on one’s chest tickled by the fragrance of mangos, and the cooing of pigeons and the chirping of sparrows, the fan whirring overhead, the pillow smelling of sun… was usual. And in these novels, may be the heroine finds a sunny afternoon to swing in the garden and hum a sleepy tune while the hero is watching her intently, with the syrupy feeling of mango-and-jackfruit love in his timid heart. May be the linen curtains flutter regularly in that cool breeze from the river─ the tension of this respite and the sweltering heat defines my Indian summer afternoon.

My father was excited to see me today morning. He gave me a long tight hug, and sitting on his hospital bed in a striped bluish apron, shaved clean, little red needle-holes all over his arm and skin rashes on his leg, a visibly sagging cheek, he looked strangely frail. The hospital insists on shaving their patients clean, his smile looks unfinished without the beard and white whiskers perking up and bracketing it. But he was happy. I plugged in a headphone and played Roberto Firpo’s Tango music for him─ he began moving his legs to the tune. I chuckled watching him─ his movement, just like the ebb and flow of Tango, was in a complex rhythm. I consider it a criterion of good music; whether in an elemental way it can simply move someone involuntarily, synchronize the synapses firing in a whole body. The body is like a boat moored in waters we can’t feel or touch, just sense the rhythm in breathing, in living, in listening.

If you are visiting India from US, consider taking the air India direct flight from New York to Delhi. Air India has too often been jeered at in the past, particularly by Indians. We tend to be very deprecatory of our own services. The modern Air India flights on this route are probably the best in its class and price-range. It’s a brand new fleet of Boeing planes with much more leg-room than, say Continental flights, much better in-flight entertainment choices and food, and a delightful eye for little details─ like providing a free pouch with ear-plugs, fragrance, eye-cover, socks… having mouthwash and fragrance in the restrooms… handing out cashew nuts instead of peanuts… using silverware instead of plastic cutlery… and of course, sari-clad stewardess! If you are not from India, you are sure to wonder how the stewardesses manage to look so graceful and be so efficient in what apparently looks like rather constraining attire (OK, I have a weakness for sari, I confess!)

In flight I watched three Bollywood movies. One was about a father who turned into a ghost after he died in an accident at his home. His son had left home to go to US for work and never returned, his wife passed away pining for her son, and he became a ghost guarding his favorite house that the family grew up in, which no one inhabits now because the son is raising a family is US! The son wants to sell the house, and the ghost guards his pride of being a father. What an admonishing melodrama! If you want to subject yourself to such emotional manipulation, that is.

Unable to sleep, I was distracting myself listening to Beethoven’s piano sonatas by Mitsuko Uchido, Gundeccha borthers’ Raag Darbari recital, reading “Ghost” by A. Lightman and occasionally doing some sketching. Dozing off I had this strange thought of whether it is greener to use silverware on flights than using disposable plastic cutlery! Does one need to factor in the cost of carrying the extra weight of silverware in flight, besides the detergents used in cleaning? Or is that negligible? Later, I dreamt of huge forks on legs trudging through the snow, piercing a leaf of cabbage for a hat and looking rather glum in their natural slump and thin features. A sleep deprived mind is dangerous entity.
The fan is still whirring.

September 7th

Grass
(Ghāsh)
~ Jibanananda Das
(Translated by Buddhadeva Bose)

The world this morning is filled with soft green grass, gentle like green lemon-leaves,
Like an unripe orange it is—this green grass—as fragrant—with the deer ripping it off with teeth.
How I wish I too could drink the fragrance of this grass, like some greenish wine, chalice after chalice,
Could squeeze the flesh of this grass, rub my eyes against its eyes and my feathers against its plumage,
Could descend from the savory darkness of some warm
grassmother’s flesh and be born as grass within the grass.

*** ***

This is my last post about my current India travel. I leave tomorrow. What better way to remember Bengal than with the pensive poems of JIbanananda Das? Drove off to the villages today. Puja is coming. The rural landscape is green with paddy, and the sides of the roads are adorned with Kash flowers. The festive air is still a bit too humid, but the clouds are turning whiter and smaller, the sky is becoming clearer each day, whispering sweet nothingness to the ponds rich from the gifts of monsoon. The drums are out, they have begun playing their hypnotic rhythm in Bengal’s heart. I am leaving. The days of Bengal ripen with the songs and laughter of puja, and it will hardly reach my ear many seas away.