A humble author and seven husbands

I love Ruskin Bond. When I first read about Rusty in his “Room on the roof” I wanted to write him a love letter. I was determined about posting it, to send it to his Mussourie home amidst vineyards and cool orchards. I have not searched for pictures of his home. I have imagined it in my mind; that is the kind of house I would love him to live in. I wrote about myself, about the warm feeling which his eyes set in me every time I turn to see his little portrait on the back of his books. I wrote some more about my hatred for fishes, about the guy I loved, about my wishes to spray-paint the walls of neighbouring houses, about my thoughts on photographs. And in the urgency to divulge many a thing, the letter went on and on but never really went to the place it was supposed to reach.

In time the letter started to become yellow and stiffened, crumbling into folds that have now set deep gorges across it. From the status of a letter it elevated to that of a scrapbook which held emotions burgeoning out of the many phases I found in life. The day they sold my bicycle I wrote to him how a part of childhood depleted like brittle sand. Now that the days of watching the neighbourhood riding its crooked paths were over I wished to go beyond the places where the bicycle could possible take me. Another time, it was night if I can recall, I chose to write that I was scared of shadows creeping out of us, taller than we can ever be. I wrote about days that seemed less hopeful than others, I borrowed accounts from stories that were not mine to tell. In all the veracity I was trying to portray, I kept running in circles on a green pasture which seemed like the only place of hope I could travel to. Every night I would slide the letter beneath my bed after adding one or two lines until one day a virulent procrastination gripped me. I was less enthused, less bemused than before. I felt few things in my fist, and even fewer things to write about.

Last night I picked up a Ruskin Bond book after a whole year. I have missed his gentle boggy eyes, soaked in a lukewarm love. But a year has gone by. I have lost a lot of vigour I had before, to run away like Rusty. Few of those dreams that gyrated around me all the time have now sublimated. I now eye for the more possible, more achievable destinations. Misty mountains have been replaced by California blues, let us suppose, or Scottish farms by Goan churches. Last night was one of those nights when nothing happened, last night had on it the burden of normalcy or the sadness of not being exceptional, not standing out of its clan. Last night failed to bring back old lovers or new ones. Deserted by both memory and belief last night seemed like an itinerary, travelled a million times before, with no new promise to offer. And on such a banal night I read a story of love, of betrayal of murderous fit, unfaithful husbands and a black spider. I wonder how the author who has been my constant source of hope and beauty for fifteen years changed his path. Of how the author who wrote about seeing his dead father by the riverside has traversed the desolate corridors of a woman of ruthless kind. The author who would speak about enchantment was suddenly talking about remorse, about vicious anguish, about all that was dark amidst the marshy forests of his Mussourie.

For a while my faith in him felt desecrated. The sunshine which I saw in him seemed to have left. Let there be one author for eternal hope, I have always prayed and there he was, in the letters of his book, in the blackness of a ghastly love, with the optimism he induced in everything now ephemeral like the smoke rings coming from cigarettes. And when the fervour of heart was over, there came an urge to revisit all that I have gone through in this blasphemous night. Somehow I could not contain in me the idea of my faith in him shattering this way.

With rationales I started afresh, contemplating all that I observed. And then I learned like I have always learnt from him. That his trees still grow in Dehra unlike I have envisaged. That faith might divert its course for a while and yet remain the faith it was. It might seem adamant and bewildering for the time and yet find its way to be loyal. And as I let go of my fatuous stubbornness with a sigh, we, I and his coolness, bonded like lovers.

A bird sang from a distant perch on midnight, long after I have stopped hearing Simon & Garfunkel on Jango....!!
With that I fetched my old letter from under my bed.

Holi

For the first few minutes before I started typing, my time went trying to unearth a better title. Maybe it is because of Pamuk’s ‘Other Colours’ lying beside me on the table or what I cannot say but I wanted a title that gives the impression of some weighty literature or even the faint possibility that I would create some in future. I have been writing for many years now. From juvenile experiences to meaningless infatuations, from backlashes received after producing pitiable exam papers to endless striving through years of suffocating sadness, slowly I have developed a way with words which goes hand in hand with my continual endeavour to learn more about literature. Yet when it comes to writing something that would probably metamorphose my life or all the meanings I have added to it, giving it greater essence and purpose, I find the opportunity fleeing like quick sand. Scanning through the sooty memories of disparate glories scattered over twenty odd years I realised that greatness is still a long shot. Thus for a perfectly well-spent day of an otherwise banal life, let us start with the quotidian name which it has received. Today is the day I played Holi.

Memories related to this festival from the early years of my life are rather numbered. My father being a sailor man hardly stayed home during the time I was growing up. Somehow Holi seemed to be the most depressing day in the childhood of an ebullient girl. I remember spending the Holi morning at my grandmother’s place, sitting on her balcony playing with plastic toys while the twins and their cousins, who lived next door, would scream and splash colours at each other. I would not say I missed my father, or even having a sibling. At an extremely unripe age like that claiming to feel the absence of a person would be bit of long-drawn exaggeration. Incapable of realizing what I was feeling I approximated it as sinking down in nothingness which seemed to be a reasonable surmise. Now I know that I felt something close to segregation, of being left out from the childish banter which every child deserves. Finally as the vivacious air settled down at the end of the twin boys’ colourful mirth, my grandmother would come to take me in for lunch. As she put me down for the afternoon nap I would tell her in details about the colours the neighbourhood boys played with and how I always secretly prayed that the elder of the twin brothers would win in the game they devised of throwing water filled balloons at each other. At times I tested my grandmother’s wits by asking her uncomfortable questions about my so-called seclusion. But she always had a sanguine answer that would buoy me up from those void layers (of melancholy) I was swimming in.

In few years my days of despair were over as I moved to a new home and found new friends. Yet those few solitary days of Holi I spent in my initial childhood come back to me every year as the festival arrives; maybe because the wounds of our childhood leave indelible impressions or because the tender love of my grandparents has set its coolest shade on my life in those years or maybe because I was less used to the absence of a parent that has always left my life half full.

Today I played Holi with friends. One could sense in us the juvenile excitement since yesterday as we carefully fulfilled the important errands required for buying colours and water balloons and other accessories indispensable for this joyous event. Avin’s house has been the holy abode of all our dreams and games for the past three years. Ironic that I knew Avin’s house before I actually came to know Avin. We moistened each other’s face with blue, green, yellow and ran over the roof like ragged urchins. We painted the walls with coloured water which, I feel now, has washed away part of the disappointment I have been carrying with me due to my many failures in this year. In our jocund participation and raucous laughter we disrupted the silence which the afternoon sun casts everyday on the neighbourhood.

As the arduous gallivanting subdued with all its fervour the hour of reclining arrived. We sat there for a while, stuck in a state of silent torpor like a bunch of inactive birds exhausted after a flight through stormy rainfall. The water dripped down the wings we managed to develop in those few hours. Back then it felt that there was no hint of apprehension, that the expectation I have from me could be set aside like some secondary purpose, that my tryst with someone who I am not would finally meet its fatal end thereby liberating me to the world I so dearly long for.

The evening reflected itself on the glasses of alcohol which we all wanted to savour at the day’s end. I knew my departure for the day was called for and I set for home walking past the fluorescent street lights into which a swarm of insects were flying. Owing to habit I seldom pay notice to the people walking around me. However, today there seemed to be a lateral resuscitation within this apparent getting lost in myself. The evening appeared more hopeful. It seemed like an evening for the ones who have lost their way or for those who have planned to begin a journey from a wrong path. Riding my humble auto I headed home listening to The Rain Song on a day when there was no rain, only a shower of evening fragrance that brought to me a hint of July. Suddenly there was the wholesome feeling of being amidst green, amidst friendships that asked for little in return. Suddenly I felt less angry with myself, with my mistakes in the past which then seemed to be pardonable. Suddenly there was the feeling of being a part of those neighbourhood kids whose world I have been carrying in my pocket for all these years.

Vicarious

Suddenly this afternoon I remembered an old game which I and mother used to play during younger times, at night. Younger times they were, when we both would be up oppressed by a windless summer night, waiting for father to come home from endlessly long voyages. Mother, then in her thirties, would hardly be able to indulge in some meaningful conversation with a girl so young that even dolls made little sense to her. As silence would only thicken the moist languor smeared over our faces on such nights we discovered this game. One was supposed to write on another one’s hand as the latter closed her eyes and tried to guess the thing being written. Needless to say I always won. I had the edge of motherly love which let me win even if I mumbled out ridiculously nonsensical words that I would have been unable to repeat the very next moment. Nevertheless, that’s what mothers do. They never let you lose even when you do not win. Before this little story digresses any further from its rather strange name I would trace my way back. Many years later when I grew up and came across this word it took me back to those nights when I remember to have laughed the loudest.

Vicarious. Something experienced in the imagination through the feelings or actions of another person.

Many of you might not agree with me but the very idea the word suggested seemed like that thrilling juvenile adventure (yes, let me be little dramatic) I had in those sleepless hours with mother. Trying to imagine what she was thinking, trying to see the same before my eyes as her fingers ran over my back, a vicarious pleasure filled my inside.

Since I had that faint idea of being vicarious I have applied it often in my life. 

On too many early mornings when I had to be at school studying mind-numbing algebra, I imagined undisturbed slumber. Vicarious slumber!

Every time I was dragged forcefully to learn Tagore songs I did not understand, I would imagine hearing Paul, Peter, Mary or Dylan in my mind. Vicarious music!

Soon after that, as I was forced to study poets or authors in Bengali I never liked, I would read Tagore in my mind. Shishu, Binodini, choto nodi, Shesher Kobita….. Vicarious literature!

Of the few meaningless trysts I had with even fewer men and their conversations over coffee I thought of the right one, of the endless conversations we would once have while having a less insipid meal. Of Dylan, of Cohen on days of rain without a raincoat. Vicarious romance!

Without Dylan I will not be half the person I am today. I owe that to him as I wish further to be his blue-eyed son. Even now after winning a few battles, I tend to be vicarious from time to time. To escape from a stolid present where nothing amuses one too deeply, I keep drifting between a lost childhood and a coveted tomorrow, oh so vicariously! Part of me longs for the evening spent at didar bari fighting with brother, part of me thinks of a house on Scottish lands sipping tea with kids whose names I do not know. But none of me wishes to stay here as I am now, like an exhausting continuum. The oceans lying ahead of it are dead and the wind brings redolence of only the last day of autumn, no spring to follow only perpetual fall.

With great loss comes great power? I wonder how else I developed the skill to swing over vicarious existences in such beautiful synchronization. As the grim dusk expands on the evening sky my vicarious twins return to their imagined abodes leaving behind my humourless phlegmatic presence. Every day they take me to newer places of past and future, either forgotten or unimagined. I wonder what Camus meant when he called for one’s very existence being a rebellion. Am I imposing such behaviour towards myself by such deliberate avoidance of living the reality? The words fail to appear at this juncture thereby proclaiming a silent tirade.

Of all my vicarious experiences only one fails to appear before me, the ones that would give a hint of those nights that have gone a decade ago. Me and mother gave grown older. Even though we have not grown apart something prevents me to sleep beside her. Of course the many sheaths that have deposited themselves on me require space, some privacy I believe, reducing the idea of setting for a vicarious journey with her to be unwarranted, ridiculous!

My handicaps have become so unavoidable that the sky lowered to touch my back in consolation like my mother once did.

Heat

It is March and the heat is already oozing out of invisible orifices present almost everywhere. Calcutta summer and it’s very own oppressing ways have acquainted themselves with me for the past twenty years. The dull white morning heat and the sultry fumes that originate from it together devise clandestine processes to unleash such unrestrained atrocities which only ascend a steady curve as the hours of the day pass. I go to college every morning witnessing a city full of irascible sweat, pissed off, about to explode any moment. A depressing humidity distends out of everything, of the people around me as it casts an impervious sheath of wily magic, perhaps borne out of disappointment, heartfelt and integral of every being walking, talking, doing all the important chores it was meant to do.

College itself brings its own lot of miseries every day. Added to mundane lectures, approaching deadlines and over-pouring dustbins the heat there takes almost a diabolical turn. The fastidious people with intentions a gazillion-miles away from my own easygoing self disrupts the faint redolence of childhood I would try to detect with the delicate wind in the air. My fantasies and idiosyncrasies find themselves endangered being out in the heat that has now gone resplendent with the afternoon sun. Their existence results in catastrophic outcome, one which ridicules me out loud and then flies away with those once beautifully knitted fetishes for amateur desires. The menacing humidity lingers to my nude incapability like a gelatinous mixture. The moist desperation to escape to faraway lands, to my grandfather’s home up there in the hills gets dissolved in it without leaving a trace. I stills struggle to figure out the day when I tumbled forth, like a rolling stone, to a world of contrasts. Sluggishly the sun gentles itself to cut some slack in a lurid disaster that then seeks its daily conclusion.

I walk past the trees, the pebbled roads and the barren field with a football bouncing on it, every evening. I try not to read beneath the myriad faces, between the countless lines I hear. At times, when I stumble on a pebble on my way I look back, to find friends I have left behind or an unfinished poem beneath my bedside lamp.

I look high up to the empty roof as it brings back you and I seated on its precarious edge, laughing over silly despairs. I miss the crows over our heads that evening moving in circles.

Our roof had love blowing in the wind. Now I miss a blissful shelter that has desolated my heart, after evaporating with the heat.

A tad less than

Somehow this title has been hovering in my head since the middle of the day. Of late things have been like this, little short of whatever they were supposed to be. Then again I think I am wrong. The definitive hour when this phenomenon started goes back quite a few years. Perhaps we are all too tired, of the mindless rambling all around, of treating non-problems as problems, of a relentless exhaustion from which there seems no respite, no escape…. Perhaps we are all too tired and sleepy to feel that we are that way.  The hurdles I pass, the tests I give everyday somehow fail to provide that idyllic rush of happiness, that sense of relief and success even after I have crossed all of them.

Did I take the road not taken?
Has that made all the difference?
Questions have baffled me, making me reach the end of my wits. In the end they disappear somewhere like the white clouds which rotates over my morning coffee every day. But the misty enigma which sheaths tomorrow’s vision persists and thickens itself every day. When I was younger I used to derive some sort of saccharine pleasure from this mystery, even if my tomorrow was part of that not knowing. Somehow the unknown had a romantic notion, perhaps of an adventure or of a realization. Perhaps that’s what childhood is all about, to descry a far-off horizon and to be happy with just the knowledge of its existence. Discovering that could be postponed by a silent procrastination. Let Dylan and Cohen make sense today, let the tambourine play this night. Tomorrow’s morning and all that would come with it could be taken care of, after the tambourine ceases to play. Childhood was like this.

When I grew up everything stayed at its place. Music still elucidates all the wonderfulness it has on windy nights. The road beside me house still looks beautiful when soaked in moonlight after midnight. The 2a.m. tryst with a certain chocolate cookie which drives me through endless periods of hapless introspection is the indelible part of childhood in my adult self. What changed was me. With an unfelt hasty snatch I was removed from the centre of the space that once used to complete me. Now there is just an oddity, of belonging somewhere where everything has upturned itself.

Travel in a lost land is tiring. Through tenuous inroads it leads us to mirages of helpless despair. An impediment it appears indeed. The doable gets tougher and even when it gets done the sense of an ending hardly appears. Then again what more can one get from a mirage? Of lost hope and lost dreams I wonder what is more painful. Both bring an unfinished ending, one whose sour aftertaste exacerbates the prominent declivity which comes with it.

Once I started a cab-ride with someone who told me I was his favourite woman. In this long road which I should not have taken, it has been the only journey which brings back an old fragrance. That was my brief period of adultery, with childhood, against my adult self.  Someday I will perhaps get back to my old lover once again, and his cab full of darkness to talk about Floyd or to read the books I dare not read alone. Ironical that his darkness seems more resplendent and sanguine than the juncture at which I stand with sunlight full of paleness. It heals the palpable wounds on my idiosyncrasies. It smiles like Edelweiss, every time it meets me.

Nameless

Perhaps the toughest part of creating an article is not embedded in creating it, but in naming it. Oddly enough this fact has never bothered me until now. Of all the pieces I have written, of all the poems I have weaved, I have always begun with the name, always. As if the name in my mind gave the image of what I was about to reflect in words. The title in bold gave me a sense of strength, a wave of confidence which made me believe that I was capable of doing what I have just started, that my words will sit together in mellifluous harmony to paint a picture never seen before. Today, standing at a clueless juncture that separates today from tomorrow, as I begin to bring together few aimless words wandering before my vision on paper I wonder how eloquent the irony of life can be.

Four weeks before this night, as the last hues of crimson sunk beneath that unknown place where it travels every day, my friend died. My friend died with the dolorous rays of the sinking sun that evening, departing from life in the most unsaid manner, much like the sunrays which die every day. Certain changes I believe never take place. Sandip’s death seemed like one of that kind. As preposterous as this thought might sound, the idea of his not being here, alive, appears the same to me. Nobody said that the sense of an ending will always be an accomplishment. As much as we rush to end certain things, others like the last day of school, last chapter of a great book, a handful of childhood dissolved in our mature self never really end, never really bid us adieu! For three years, Sandip and I sat together, everyday, and tried to define a better tomorrow for ourselves. Beneath books of algebra we passed mindless jokes and trivial secrets. We blinked our eyes as the teacher would hush us for disrupting an air full of decorum and silence. Often I would discuss boys with him while he would seek advices to woo few of my friends. Sandip and I went away in different directions, much like two birds that lived and chirped on the same tree and one morning, one fine morning chose to migrate away, in different directions. Years later as that fateful evening came with no wind, no sun, no birds around us, Sandip got hit, by a bus and left our hearts, bare and barren. Like the numb sun and silent sky which give no hint. And now he keeps me waiting, for a closure I suppose, to the chapter I started writing with him. It had my friend who loved him a lot, who gave him her entire heart for real, once and for all. He keeps her waiting too, I know it for sure.

Of late I have let myself indulge into periods of prolonged contemplation. I would have used the word introspection but that gives the promise of a consequent conclusion, one that makes us realise where it went wrong and often seeks another lateral promise of making corrections. This entire process of pondering does not provide a befitting panacea to all my woes. The times are (surely) a changing. So much that Dylan and Cohen and Young have to keep alive in me that one silent hope which I had gathered after being abandoned like a waif by the other types. Hope is a fleeting device, one needs to tie it by one’s bedpost, talk to it every day, smile at it every morning and stroke it to sleep every night. Otherwise it mingles into nowhere without a clue, like the most ruthless irony if there was ever one. Or maybe it is just me who has been gifted with such ephemeral forms of faith of late. For years I have waited for things to reveals themselves to me, through books, through music, through lessons, through love, through loss I waited with an endless, insatiable desire for one epiphany that would perhaps put an end to everything that is now grimly holding me back. Well as I have read Virginia Woolf I could correct this act of folly soon enough----- “the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come.” Honestly, one knows this truth all along. Things do not open up themselves, light never shines in the night sky. If there was one thing that life had to reveal, it was this fact that there never was a thing to be revealed. We need to find our own playthings, make our own happiness and eliminate our own sorrows. Yet one needs to rely on such divine intervention and wait for it. Otherwise the little illuminations of everyday that, though faintly, gives the hint of it, goes unnoticed.

A life without waiting is a life without aim or such is what I would like to believe. A life that waits is the one that tries to reduce the meters in order to diminish the wait. It is the life which tends to move through unaccustomed recesses and find new ways, the life which dares to come out of its own for a make-belief or a possible dream. Perhaps it was in those dark corners of mind where these thoughts were etched, that my love for travel began. When I was younger summers used to be reserved for travel. With time my summers grew shorter, summers were no longer the time to see faraway lands, summers ceased to take me to my grandfather’s house. Summers for me became as wilted as they were for anybody else. What was sadder, it became indiscernible from autumn, winter, rain, the other seasons of school and work and games of no fun. My ideas of travel and all that was romantic about it became like a secret lover, one with which I had a certain illicit commitment, to be revealed only in the arcane scripts of my notebooks. The postcards and pictures I would pin up there became yellow and broken in time. The snow-caps of Peling or the orchards of Missouri looked alike, stained and almost unidentifiable, like the old chapters of once an interesting time. The lesser I crossed the roads the more I wandered in my mind, the more determinate my dream of going to a foreign land became. Travel brings its own perils, especially this stagnant kind of mind-travelling where you walk in the velocity of lightyears in spite of staying put. Perhaps it is a kind of unimaginable fantasy I indulged into, the one that poured out of my insanity to proclaim a kind of hegemony on my other saner half, the one that went to school, did her lessons through the many seasons of love and loss.

Between love and loss I wonder what can bewilder man the most, especially a peripatetic man. A wayfarer loves his ways and he leaves one in search of another. I am no traveller, yet I have had my share of this game. Of the many loves I have known or the many losses I have felt it is hard to sort out which one has debilitated me the most, which one was so empowering that in its vigour it penetrated a numbness into all my senses. The greater was the love in a thing the more shredded I was in the pain of losing it. The louder the wail was after losing those precious threads, one for an avuncular tie, one for a brother, one for a friend or one for the child I was, the more I wept after every tiring night, a deeper, desolate meadow of absolute hopeless tranquillity followed it. Yet I fell in love again with the little success and surprises of life, with the new friends I made, with myself now so adult. And why this endless desire of risking the heart all over again? The fine line that exists between courage and foolhardy is the one along which we row our oars.

In the end I know what I am looking for, a room of my own. A room to live and breathe in, a room for journeys and a room for the author who will liberate the stories I like, the ones that have a dead brother, a lovely friend, a weeping girl and a magic rabbit, the ones which need to be told for my sake.

Anrin & I

TO IRIS

where did we part,my beloved of the east

upon some moss ridden rock does our sepulchre lie

where for once did our love strain and heave

to fall anew,a martyr,

a stranger to our creed less divine;

and the lunatic rain caressed my bleeding being

every leaf did mock my burning soul

until the darkest abyss from beyond did grow

to engulf my sordid soul from within;

and in death did i seek a morbid friend

the clamorous world now a dreaded foe

for men and beast alike did seem

scars upon HIS divine embroidery;

till upon a stranger land

i saw an iris smile at me

lone was she so i sat for long

and there ne'er we spoke for once and still

i knew her of her own free will

and i loved her more than i ever could love

and she loved me till she could love no more

and in a frenzy of passion did i pluck her out

and took her to my humble home

there she wilted under my loving gaze

as in brazen sounds did we serenade

our love through the silent night

till she could sing no more,

and fell upon my arms dead

so no love ever i lost but two

and in HIS altar did i pray

he forgave for the one before

but not for the one i lost that day

for i had killed his heavenly child.....

~ by Anrin Chakraborti

With Anrin I have walked a path

so long that now I fail to recall

when and where it was formed from two

and yet has seemed to be one all along

Often as my musings bring back

dust left behind an hour so fateful

they all seem alike, red  blue or yellow

in the shadow of a night that had prevailed till then

We have been lovers at the altar of art

and friends of a kind only we know of

with poems and songs that live in us

being cohorts of a dream I dare speak not

My prose of quartets fumbles in the end

To speak of what love we have shared

in evenings that have fallen from grace

and mornings of a certain sunny despair......