Arranged night Deranged life

Today I woke up early at around 4.30 and couldn’t think of anything to fall asleep for (yes, no shame in admitting that I am an insomniac!)….therefore focused on a much neglected ‘project’ of arranging my modest music collection in genres. Took about an hour but now they are proudly arranged in dedicated shelves with Faith Hill sitting next to Garth Brooks and Pink Floyd next to Grateful Dead. Plus half a rack (furthest away) of hindipop (kajrare and himesh reshmiya’s nasal cry!) that I usually play when I need to feel foolish which is mostly when I am getting ready for work and to distract the voice in my head that keeps repeating ‘you don’t HAVE to do this’.

Only if I could bring back...

• Hot summer nights on my grandfather’s terrace, lying on our backs and looking up at the clear sparkling sky and racing each other to identify the constellations
• Watching ‘telesports’ with bhai on our black and white EC TV and laughing our guts out
• Tangy hot ‘phuchkas’ at gariahat with Diya and our first puffs in her amby with Appy wondering what these two girls-trying-to-be-women doing ducking at the back seat!
• Visits to Birla Museum with Sammy trying to look intelligent while she rattles away the details of the art on display
• Braving chilly winds and going for morning walks with the ‘polton’ (platoon) of cousins in kalyani during winter break
• Chotokaku’s monkey skull (and his narration of how he acquired it from a godman in the Himalayas on one of his anthropology tours) that fired our adolescent imagination
• Chotokaku’s planchette table - an inheritance that I had really hoped for.. (predictably Thamma got rid off it and the skull after he moved to Rhode Island)
• Sunday-post-lunch walks to khuni talao at the Ridge (D School campus) - the absolute quiet of the place, the eerie light and mostly shadows, the irritating stumbling bramble, the bristling frisson and goose bumps of knowing that none know of my whereabouts and of course the customary angry looks from IK when I would tell him with glee my exploits of the late afternoon.
• Bonfire at the Freedom party (for freshers) at D School and my verbal duel with IK
• Amazing ‘vada-sambar’ at Coffee House (D School) served on pristine white-but-chipped-here-and-there crockery
• Nimbo pani and dripping-oil bread roll at jai jawan tea stall (D School)
• New years eve at Fort William, Kolkata with San and bro and XXX rum for 2 bucks a peg
• Fried salami at Milli's place and San's expertise (the juvenile fear in his eyes when he gashed his little finger!)
• Long tirades from Ani when I moved to Delhi and she felt abandoned
• Last visit to Sparks with bro when they played Tequila Sunrise
• Watching Dominick and Eugene with bro and how he said ‘we are like that na…you and I?’
• Long late night drives on the Ring road..our conversations and more
• 30th December 2004 : Faith Hill never sounded like that night

Phoenix Mumbai

Tuesday 11 July 06

7.05PM : On my drive back home dad calls and tells me about the blasts and that he has been trying to contact Munni and AC Roy uncle and got through to AC Roy uncle and they are fine but for Chotopishi he sent a message as the call wasn't going through. All lines jammed.

7.10PM: Trying D's number repeatedly but its not going through. Panic. Is he ok? My hands are cold and don't much remember the traffic. He told me he is using the train. Trying hard to convince myself that he wouldn't be using the western line but Andheri? He is supposed to be looking for a place in Marol. That is most definitely western line. And he did speak about firstclass. Missed call. Mumbai number. Vague feeling it is him. Called back. Got through at the 5th attempt. "Good Evening, Hilton Towers. May I help you?". Said I got a call from this number and that I am trying to reach a guest of theirs. Why do the hotel reception ask so many questions? What is his name? Full name please. Where is he from? Do I know his room number? (Maybe I DID sound like someone who can blow up the hotel through tele line!) Finally she connects and its him saying he is fine and he came back to the hotel early. His mom's ok too and his spice line is not working. Said I will call his home and bro. Called his bro and home. Lines in Bangalore seem to be jammed too!!! Frustration!! They have heard from him and relieved.

8.00PM : Images passed rapidly on the TV screen....charred seats, mangled flesh, confused and angry faces...Mumbai railways in tatters. There was one particular image of a missing 8 year old boy who lay in ICU and didn't remember his name.

Wednesday 12th July 06

2.00AM : I lay awake the entire Tuesday night watching the news and those densely repeated images. The newsreader said that the railways wouldn't be operating and Mumbai is paralysed atleast for a day.

9.00AM : Trains were running every 15 mins on the much damaged western line.

10.00AM : Talking to S and saluting the spirit of Mumbai.

11.00AM : Heard that Rg's father in law is suspected to have been killed in the blast. He has been missing since he left office last evening. Rg has flown to Mumbai in the morning. His wife was hysterical. She was advised by the doctor not to travel in her pregnant state.

6.10PM : D says everything looks normal in Mumbai

6.30PM : Read "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." MLK

11.45PM : Can't get rid of the number 11 in my head.

11 - the number in my mail ID which inspired bhai to write the piece posted earlier.

11 September 01 - WTC attack

11 April - S's b day

11 September 04 - lost bhai for ever

11 July 06 - Mumbai blast

transplanted

"finding yourself in the same place over and over again until you get it exactly right"- read it recently on a wiseman's piece...brought back memories...whole lot of them..tears and smiles as I drifted, 'rooting', uprooting and transplating with ease and pain...inexcapable.

Grebulon I love you!

madness runs in my family :) ....this was a mail that my bro wrote when I created my hotmail id with the numeral '11' in it...!
 

Hello Grebulon, It is imperative, for you, and for the survival of your planet, your job, and your mental hygiene that we know the significance of the numeral 11 in your current email, in your past email, in your husband's email(past/present) and in your calorific diet intake, failing which we will irrevocably annihilate you. We, ofcourse will get 11 guesses as follows:

1) you see 11 people after consuming 11 bottles of vodka

2) you make 11 million USD annually(in which case we will contact the Internal Revenue Department or Westside Department Store as applicable)

3) you need 11 stiff drinks to get through everyday(in which case you should check into a clinic!!)

4) 11 is actually 10 + 1, but you are yet learning mathematics (and how is this significant....I don't know)

5) you buy 11 thousand rupees worth of eyeliner, in which case again clinic for eyeliner addicts come to mind

6) 11 is a sacred number to you - how - only you know and I will find out through hypnotherapy

7) you have 11 subordinate staff under you in your team to whom you shout 11 times a day...an activity every Grebulon is very proud of.

8) you eat 11 hamburgers a day and deny it again 11 times a day??

9) you get promoted( and demoted) 11 times a day

10) one day you will realize 11 is totally the most irrelevant numeral in the total universe, but by then you will have a number 12 fetish.....can't help you there.

11) I'm running out of ideas......hmmmmmm.....

Jyothika ouchhh!!

What's with me today? Some one said I look like the film actor Jyothika...wondering if the joke's on her or me....

Hotel California?

Walls and doors covered in mirrors and chandelier hanging from the ceiling in the middle, high above the floor. Fading sunlight streaming through the windows to the west and everything had a warm orange glow including the chandelier with a patina of dust aged to perfection for about 50 years or so. The ceiling was real high from where I stood, in the middle of the room and from my four-feet-above-ground eye level everything looked monstrously high. That is the first thing I remember and the mirrors. I could see myself reflecting from every wall of the ‘room’. I twirled and the 50 odd me twirled with me. The ‘room’ was a 50 x 30 ft. space of pure bliss. Welcome to my grandfather’s ‘house’.

My grandfather worked for the railways and from the size of the ‘house’ that housed his office and residence one could safely assume he was at the top of the railway ‘babudom’. Mom and I were visiting along with my brother who was all of four months and whom my grandparents were meeting for the first time, the purpose of our visit. My grandfather was posted in Kanchrapara, a ‘mofussil’ town 80 kilometres from Calcutta, whose only claim to fame was and still is, a large railway workshop set up by the British. On a sultry August afternoon, we arrived at Kanchrapara, on rail, from where we were ferried in my grandfather’s old Austin which was rather crammed with all of us packed like sardines on the back seat and the spilled over luggage from the boot filling every left over inch of space in the car. My brother who was other wise a peaceful soul chose that moment to wake up and greet the world with his ‘baritone’ which later ofcourse stood him in good stead in his ‘band’ days in school and college. I would guess he was suitably overwhelmed by the abundant attention my grandparents were showering on him and ofcourse Sitaram my grandfather’s driver cum orderly cum everything else, who continued to speak with me in bhojpuri with total disregard for the fact that I had no comprehension of either the language or the man. The heat, the sweat and the well timed wails were all that I remember of the journey. We went passed the gates and drove in on the pebbled pathway for about 100 meters till the main door of the ‘house’.

The ‘house’ was a grey coloured stone and wood ‘bungalow’ with two floors covering 4000 square feet of the 2 acres compound and was built around 1870. The main door bore my grandfather’s name and what I assumed his ‘rank’. His office was the entire right hand portion of the ground floor and had wooden benches for the visitors. In one of the bigger rooms was his massive desk covered with various colour files and paper and ofcourse a bell and a telephone (a black contraption that could easily replace a dumb bell with its weight and aesthetics). The residence was on the first floor and the wooden staircase creaked loudly with the collective weight of several feet and tons of luggage that was being hauled upstairs. Across the glass panel of the staircase, I saw a fleeting shadow and heard an owl screech and fly pass with a whoooosh. My grand mom’s hold on my hand tightened and she gave me a quick glance and I kept wondering why.

Upstairs was made up of several rooms that could shelter at least 50 homeless families comfortably. We settled in a relatively smaller room next to my grandparent’s bedroom. Every living soul was busy fussing over my brother and his rather urgent needs which were many. The long stemmed creaky fan had to be switched on, the bed had to be readied, the diapers had to be changed and so long and so forth and there was a cacophony of the maid’s singsong bhojpuri, my mother’s pleasantly urban Bengali and my grandfather’s allahabadi hindi.

I slipped past the commotion and went downstairs. Towards the left of the staircase there was a huge dusty door, which though shut was not locked. Slight push led to my ‘glass room’. The ballroom that held the pride of place in British social calendar had been converted into a railway file ‘godown’ with some of the mirrors cracked and everything covered in generations of dust and held a dull sheen of neglect. I ofcourse took to the mirrors and the chandelier and everything else faded away in the amber afternoon glow….Sitaram called my name (for some reason he decided to call me ‘baby’…..I wonder if I was ‘baby’ then what would be my brother….but ofcourse Sitaram rose to the occasion and christened him ‘shaheb’ which suited his plump rosy skin, red lips and curly brown hair just fine…) grabbed my hand and from his tone I figured that he was not pleased at all. He told me in no uncertain terms that I should never enter the room again and then shouted at the ‘choukidaar’ to lock the door immediately.

Night arrived soon and if you have lived in a ‘mofussil’ town you would know that human activities faded quickly along with the sun and dinner in my grandfather’s ‘bungalow’ was at 8pm and the orderlies and maids left us to ourselves by 9. Only Radha remained in the house and her sole purpose was to execute my grandfather’s many unbending principles. One of them ofcourse was to ensure that his granddaughter never saw ‘nightlife’ beyond 8.30pm. From then on, the only sounds were the creaking fan, my brother’s timely noisy demands and my mother’s and grandmother’s cooing which was aimed to quieten him and meet his input and output demands. So I was left alone with eyes wide open and my mind racing to piece together every sight and sound captured through the day. It is then that Radha took pity and broke one of my grandfather’s rules and told me a story. A story she heard from her grandmother or so she told me. A story as old as the ‘house’ itself. It was to do with my ‘glass room’. She put her calloused hand on my forehead and urged me to close my eyes and she took me through time gone by, a time when the ‘bungalow’ was not used to electricity and had real ‘engrej shaheb’s and ‘mem’s and the revelry lit up the bunglow like a jewel in the night. Her bhojpuri laced bengali forced me at times to ask her to repeat certain portions of the story and as she tried to repeat she would invariably add some colourful details that escaped me earlier. She ingeniously weaved me into her story as it meandered through folklore and reality. She caressed my hair she promised to make ringlets in the morning just like those fair ‘mem’s in her story. She told me that my stray strands of gold brown hair was good enough to make me a pucca ‘mem’ of some obsolete nobility and that my hair was God’s sign that I was meant for extraordinary things. Though my life has proved her wrong several times over but somewhere in my ordinary life I am unable to shake away her fascination for my slightly odd hair. But then for a five-year-old, left to her own means and asked to keep out of her busy family’s way, she was godsend. Somewhere in the night, the story got over and I fell asleep with dreams of my ringlets reflecting across the ‘glass room’. Predictably, in the morning, my mother would have none of my talk of getting Radha to make ringlets and told me that someday I would be thankful that I have not inherited her own dreadful curls.

The mornings passed with sundry household activities and lunch was an elaborate affair everyday. My mother was her father’s pet and looked forward to these lunches and they would discuss music and politics like every bengalee’s birthright. I would try to follow snatches of the conversation and learn that communists were not radically different from communalists and that America was the ‘neo Britain’ and would enslave us in the future. What I looked forward was the post lunch siesta when life came to a standstill on the first floor and my mother and grandmother, tired from my brother’s antics, would retired to their respective bedrooms and so did the workers to their quarters. My grandfather would be in his office downstairs and since Radha loved to sleep in the hot and humid afternoons I was by and large left on my own. My interest was the first floor balcony, with its wooden railing, that ran the entire length of the building and had a swing on the far end. The swing was broad enough for four adults to sit comfortably in pairs facing away from each other. It was low enough to allow me to climb on it and sit with my legs folded. It swung gently and even the crows considered me harmless enough to come and sit on the railing and some brave ones would even come all the way inside, a few feet away from the swing. I would watch them endlessly and grew to respect their social order. When the time came which almost always coincided with Radha’s coming to fetch me, one crow, who I assumed was the leader, would fly away and in a military fashion the rest would fly one after the other in rapid succession but never all at the same time and they always gave me a backward glance.

One exceptionally hot afternoon Radha found me asleep on the swing and when I woke up in her arms as she was carrying me inside, her dark face was drained of colour and her large usually friendly eyes were fixed with a strange expression and even her gaping mouth forgot to chew the ubiquitous ‘paan’. As she carried me inside she called loudly for my mother and grandmother and the din brought the rest from every part of the house. I ofcourse was unaware of the reason for her hitherto unforeseen behaviour, since Radha in her excited state was speaking bhojpuri fast and furious. She quickly laid me down on the bed and one of other maids gave me water to drink and another fanned my forehead. Suddenly like the ‘mem’ in my dream I became the center of attention with my mother holding my hand and caressing my forehead and everybody staring anxiously at my face and stealing glances at my hair. My attempts to know what had transpired were met with stiff resistance and I was told never to ask such questions ever again and my grandmother hugged me and made me promise I would never go to the balcony and specially the swing alone again. Years later, I heard from my grandmother the incident that led to the ‘unhooking’ of the swing.

Radha as usual had come to take me inside. What she saw was me asleep on the swing and swinging with abnormal force with no apparent breeze in the stiflingly hot afternoon. According to Radha, she even looked up at the trees, that surrounded the compound, to check whether the leaves and branches felt any breeze. But no it was not breeze that swung the swing that afternoon. Then when she looked at my face she saw my hair had turned into ringlets. Acting swiftly, she picked me up from the swing, which was not easy since the swing continued to swing despite her attempts to stop it. It swung gentle enough for me to lie on it without rolling off but the force was strong enough to make it difficult for her to pick me up from it without hurting her or me.

Come evening, the entire incident, with certain obvious embellishments was narrated to my grandfather. Thankfully, my grandfather, like his principles, had several believes and ‘supernatural’ was not one of them. He dismissed the idea and sat me down on his lap and told me the story of Joan of Arc (and that she was born in January as well) while he sipped his perfected-after-several-trials tea. But in my grandfather’s absence, my grandmother ofcourse instructed everyone to never leave me out of sight.

After that incident many advised my grandfather to shift residence and the railway authorities had sanctioned another slightly less grand premises for his residence but he insisted that there was nothing wrong and stayed on until his own health deteriorated rapidly with a mysterious, what then looked like a skin allergy, from which he never recovered and passed away in a Calcutta hospital a couple of months after our visit to his ‘bungalow’.

I of course never felt any different except for developing a slight dislike for curly hair.

Foot ball Fi ver

These are the times I truly miss Calcutta.....!!!! This time I would pick Brazil and England.....but for different reasons entirely.....Bangalore too is having its share of football fever but it doesn't feel as natural as in Calcutta or maybe I have grown old, which in any case I have!....I still remember way back in 1986 bhai and I would watch the late night matches beamed live from Mexico and one night during the quarterfinal half time I got scissors and cut the string of red CPM plastic flags that the 'party' fellows had hung on our apartment window in a zig zag fashion above the road and the entire string of flags fell off with a whooosh on the road.....after a while when the fellows found out and were discussing how it could have happened we got a little scared since ma and baba were travelling abroad....I still can feel the goosebumps we felt both from the excitement of the match and my anti-establishment act of cutting the string of flags...!!