Wherever it leads

Ever since Boston rejected my application for a Masters in Creative Writing I have been deliberating over my next piece. It will not be appropriate to say that the idea of what to write on kept escaping me and resulted in this overstretched delay. It will also be inappropriate to say that the decision from Boston has made me feel awfully inadequate about my own creative capabilities. If nothing the professor from Boston left me a nice heartfelt message that, if I am to quote, highlighted more on their 'being dense about my good work' and how there can never be a failure, success or ultimatum to one's passion, only rehearsals. Of late there have been many such instances where nice and kind people have regretted more on their inability to receive me than on mine to be worthy of their invitations. Overall the penultimate month of college life has dealt me with the good, bad and ugly cards to set parameters for the next two years of my life, hopefully in New York. Now that my academic self has somewhat resolved itself it gives me enough time to look back and channel parts of it--- perhaps some gathered wisdom or an embarrassing anecdote shared with Avin on a lazy afternoon--- towards my creative self.

For those like me who feel it as their duty to write, feeling, falling and remembrance come to be necessary exercises. So while my creative outburst was moving towards its culmination, there were ample moments of standing by the balcony ledge, smelling the dusty afternoon sunlight and very often looking at the faces around you, wondering how you managed to be in this wild rumpus in the first place. As I move forward trying to make sense of all the spirited mornings and disillusioned nights, a strange feeling of being old keeps coming back. With that, fortunately, I feel a little wise.

My college life has been a sort of marriage, not particularly a satisfied, monogamous one. My ideas of becoming a writer, like the other lover, was in such active participation to increase the confusion that it was difficult to not feel exasperated at the limited prospects of a less loved monogamy.  For me writing was a challenge that I could never live up to. The very vagueness of the idea of good writing seems attractive enough to be chased and ultimately achieved. There is a deep heroic in this sort of success, like those glorified tales of an underdog conquering an otherwise dissatisfied life and rising over its ashes. On another thought it was perhaps led by those poignant covers of beautiful poem books where the evening sun peeping through half open doors can easily be personified to hope, inspiration and whatever drives one ahead. An insatiable quest for life's one true purpose, increased self-awareness and quotes of Susan Sontag could only make this forced juxtaposition of me and some unimportant college assignments so mundane. All I waited for in these years were uninvited mango showers, months of July and the sense of liberation that came with the wind.

 In the last four years I have also been overtly conscious of the love I possess for my cities. I have written many times before about Calcutta and how it was to grow up in a city stuck between an unparalleled urge for progressiveness and medieval nostalgia. But in the light of emotions I have recently gathered I felt my puny essays would feel the strokes of chords they had previously missed. I love Calcutta for almost everything. The technicolour hoardings looming over the busy Bypass road on a lit up evening, the smell of soil from my backyard garden, Tagore house and ever-busy phuchka-walas delivering in lightning speed one of the most refreshing snacks there could be. Then there is school and first friendships, my best friend and her crazy antics. Then there are people who basically constitute the very essence of my existence. Durga pujo, Deshapriya Park, tanga-wala rickshaws.

And wooden shelves of Oxford.

Calcutta to me is an unfinished poem that has shown signs of growth, courage and resilience yet has left enough room for whichever ending you want it to be. Its incompleteness is, in fact, a rare generosity. Yet there are moments in love that require lovers to drift apart, to grow away from each other now that they have grown too much into each other. Its about fluttering in whichever way you can, even after your roots are largely intertwined. The need for distance, for this sabbatical from love seems so essential for the very love to exist. That is what i feel now as I move about the city roads. The weight of the city soaked in memories, increased in manifolds, on my back telling me to slip out of its hands, to not let the moss grow beneath my feet.

I remember Rushdie's quote at this point with a slight uncomfortable anxiety.“Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.”

I speak in second person with myself while discussing fears which in the light of day find no logical validation. Then the mild breeze of summer evenings whisper in my ears, 'Necessary Travels'!

  I truly hope life continues to offer me moments of such subtle wisdom and whatever braveness is required to keep performing a catharsis of this sort.

Looking forward to useful introspection, windy nights, periods of undisturbed privacy and friendships that will pull me out of them.