Calcutta Chronicles I

Yesterday, while boarding my flight, the check-in guy looked at me and asked “Kawlkatta”, with raised eyebrows. Nothing irritates me more than people gleefully mispronouncing Kolkata and my name. Both these unfortunate names suffer the same fate because people accentuate the ‘o’ to an ‘aww’ without much reason. I don’t know whether there some awe factor here or it’s just their honest attempt to do justice to the Bengali phonetic. I rather prefer to stick to Calcutta because it so royal, reminds me of the British Raj and the good old days of the past glory of the city.

Didubhai (my grandmother) has moved into this new place, away from Dumdum where we had some sort of a ramshackle three-storeyed outhouse complete with trees, wilderness and a large muddy green pond. That house was synonymous with Calcutta to me. As the cycle-rickshaw pulled closer to the society, it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to relate to this apartment business to stay in Calcutta. That house in Dumdum represented freedom, joy and excitement. Another concrete jungle could hardly substitute for it, no matter how spacious or ‘green’ it might be. It turned out to be good indeed with highrises overlooking elegantly manicured lawns, all modern amenities et al.

After the initial bit of chatter with her, I checked out the new house which was strewn with furniture from our Dumdum house. Especially that old armchair that sat grimly in the main veranda reminded me a lot of my misadventures of my past, they are just too numerous to relate. Though its upholstery was still firm, one of its arms had fallen off. I searched for one of the lost arms of that ‘Venus di Milo’ in vain. I still didn’t get that feeling I usually get when I am in Calcutta, it seemed like another artificial, pretty apartment, nothing special at all. Despite her age, didubhai has managed to keep herself updated about all petty details of her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren and their breakfast habits. Well, it seems once you cross a certain age you cease to grow older or at least look older, despite your progressing age; didubhai bore ample testimony to that. Her skin was loose and wrinkled and it sagged all over, she hobbled about the house in a loosely draped white sari with a plainly designed colour border and her blouse always seemed to slide off her shoulders. All of that fit into place into that gaunt 5-foot frame of hers. She rattled off information which was exceedingly redundant from my viewpoint, like the relationships shared by my elder cousins with their respective mother-in-laws and an incisive analysis about the same. She spoke about people I never had the faintest clue about and soon I mastered the technique of being an expert conversationalist. I grunted at regular intervals in agreement at whatever she untiringly spoke about. That bit of acknowledgement was all she needed as encouragement. So, we chatted for hours the whole day.

Today, I woke up lazily at nine, and decided to pick up some rare books at College Street. On my way there, I was tempted to visit the place I spent most of my time in Calcutta. The world might have progressed, India might have changed but the winds of change had completely ignored this part of Calcutta. The bus which I boarded on my way to Dumdum was in its penultimate stage of dilapidation as it rattled like a prehistoric being desperate for retirement and then probably salvation. I remember my father saying that these buses were the most efficient in terms of seating arrangement, or ‘standing arrangement’ rather. There were seats lining the interior of the bus, the rest of the space available with bars on the ceiling for clinging on to. According to him, these buses hadn’t changed since his dad had come to Calcutta; beat that for dogged resistance to change. Old men sat unfazed and fat housewives held on to their overgrown, overfed kids. Girls here have this penchant for red thick ribbons tied to their braided hair; I haven’t seen this amazing spectacle anywhere else. The traffic was erratic even when completely normal always caught in crossfire of blaring horns. So, most of the things here had not changed, a very reassuring feeling.

Once in Dumdum, I slowly walked towards our house. It seemed as if it all happened in a daze. The streets lined with shops were so damn familiar; on some occasions even shopkeepers seemed recognizable. As I reached the house, I felt breathless. Though that place had been sold now, it was in a complete state of disuse. I found it locked and so I climbed the surrounding single brick wall, carefully avoiding the glass bits cemented on to that boundary wall and jumped into the wilderness. I could mentally picture the space in its heydays to its plight now. The construction stood discoloured, awkward and complaining.

Dadubhai (my grandfather), post his retirement had taken great pains to beautify this place. He had planted grass all throughout and had made a narrow brick lane way. The furrow besides the grass and the brick lane was filled with small brick chips. He used to weed out unnecessary vegetation, even from the bottom of the pond. His sense of aesthetics was decidedly amateurish, homely and likeable. He never used anything new or snazzy; everything was remodelled with recycled stuff, laboriously put in place. But all of it had a life of its own. Among various trees, we had one gigantic palm tree, one mango tree, one guava, two lemon trees and a clutch of beetelnut trees. The pond was quite large, rectangular in shape with rounded ends; luxuriant green water around seven feet deep was home to some water snakes, crabs and a variety of fish. I and all my cousins learnt how to swim there. During noon, which felt like the midnight of the day, it reflected the buildings around, silent, green and content, cradling our childhood. I used to toss stones, make them skip, glide on the surface or hurl those brick chips at unsuspecting birds much to the chagrin of dadubhai. During my summer vacations it was like a paradise getaway, away from school and all the horrid homework in Delhi.

Now, everything looked the same in a sorry sort of a way in the wild grass and the shaggy trees. From one end of the pond I could see the mango tree aching with blossom, mangoes abundant on all sides and the guava tree was dead. Another boundary wall had caved in. Right at the centre of the pond, the gnarled, rotten branches of a dead tree arose like a skeleton haunting the surroundings. People living around had found a very cost effective and convenient method of disposing their garbage. They could now just toss it into the pond without any hassle. And I stared at this putrid state of my paradise, my childhood which had ceased to reflect anything anymore owing to all trash in it. Dadubhai used to make me and my cousin work for him in return for pittance, now I felt this overwhelming urge to restore its naked orderliness. I had been sitting next to the pond for an hour now, transfixed and somewhat paralysed, even the drone of the blood thirsty mosquitoes acted as memory tags, rather than an irritation. Historical monuments had always filled me with wonder whenever I tried to imagine them in their prime looking at their ruins. Here I had seen the prime and could see its ruins too, nothing left to imagine. As I made a final inspection of the weathered remains, I saw this heavy metal roller embedded in a bald patch of land. As a child, it was my fantasy to be strong enough to roll the device. I had never managed to do it. I gave it a final tug, the rusted remains of that piece of junk budged and then fell back into that pit of neglect, coating my hands with rust. I plucked a flower and left.

I tunneled through the city in the metro and reached College Street, in this sweltering heat. First time since my visit in Calcutta I felt the unbearable heat and humidity. Sweat streamed down my throat, my nape tickling its way down irritatingly. I got a damn good bargain though with some authentic Rajput history, biography of the pugnacious Muhammad Ali, some bit on the Victorian age etc. I spiced it up with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, hoping for some excitement there. Found didubhai waiting for me even at four in the afternoon and wanted to have lunch together. Even after the hourly calls to assure my well-being had failed to convince her that I was safe and sound. Alexander might have conquered half the world by 26, but here elders refuse to believe that their kids can ever grow up…

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Today was one of the days where I was feeling a bit queasy, well not in the gastronomic sense of the word, but just a non-specific discomfort, dunno where. By some crazy coincidence had to go to ‘Not just jazz by the bay’ where they were playing some rock today, so I landed up in that over-populated, over-sexed place which was so damn smoky inside that it seemed that I had entered a sauna-bath parlour or something.

We found a coupla guys inside huddled in an impossible corner, frantically jerking their heads and swigging beer. Contrary to what I thought, it was pretty refreshing, away from the bored silence of my room. The music was jarring; it seeped through the walls and the panelling with those vibrations flowing right under my ass, titillatingly. No wonder most of the folks were standing. With all that rock beating about in hopeless futility and some beer down, I actually felt good. Amidst such noise I could think, finding coherence at the height of incoherence, another of the weirdass paradoxes of life. I had actually been thinking about this for a while now, and this was the right moment to think, I could do it swaying my head as if being possessed and all.

What is good? Good for me, for you, and the world in general? I didn’t know. I grew up thinking that people who drink, party mad, smoke-up are bad, all that changed pretty fast. My convictions, my beliefs changed as I realised that people who did not indulge in all that ‘dirty’ stuff have never tried it, they’ve just played safe, quarantining the rest. Not pointing to anything here, but just that these ‘good’ guys are half-witted and were in no position to comment about anything.

If morality was a question of time, so was our outlook. Who’s bad or ugly is just about perspectives, perception frames, logic bubbles, et al. As I thought, I spotted a hideous creature. This chick wore a dark top, her huge jugs flattened by the fabric, splayed all over her torso. I really hoped she was wearing some kind of a bra, didn’t want to imagine her without one. Talk about disturbing images. Her belly uncomfortably jutted out of a cheap leather steel- studded belt, the kind Russell Crowe wears in Gladiator. Her ass sagged in that frayed denim skirt that kissed her shiny red toes. Oh God, was she ugly? I can swear she was, but probably much better than me in many more ways than one. Maybe her physical ugliness diffused into her character as well? maybe not? When Toifler suggested that we need to learn, unlearn and relearn all the time, was he bang-on. I was relearning the basics of not gauging people based on certain principles, they could be goddamn misleading.

I couldn’t help thinking about our own mythology, Ravana our epic villain, who was bumped off by Ram in that fierce battle, was supposed to be bad. Or at least that’s what’s taught. And remember, good wins over the evil... But I recall reading somewhere that another version of Ramayana says that when Ram took out his brahmastra (divine weapon) gifted by the supreme God Brahma and fired it at the demon king, Ravana accepted it. He could have slung the brahmastra he possessed, but that would have meant complete annihilation, assuming apocalyptic proportions, destroying mankind. Two brahmastras against each other releases a lot of unwanted energy, like two similar forces pitted against the other. He could have been a bad sport, after all wasn’t he evil. Anyways he was dying; Ram was a mighty good shot. Ravana wanted the well-being of his people. He was defending his turf where Ram was chasing his vain ego. Who’s good? Who’s bad? Both? None? Maybe.

No point playing safe and crawl your way to a hundred years, it was much more exciting to try new things and drop-off in the middle. This was not my conclusion, just another musing. I was quite incapable of concluding now; the music was a bit too much. Initially you make friends with people based on certain characteristics you like, you identify with, you come closer to them, hang out with them and all, and then is exposed the jagged realities, the ghastly underbellies, all a part of the same individual. Probably familiarity does breed contempt. There seemed no solution available to define parameters of goodness, to scale folks and grade them which would remain unchanged over a fairly long period of time. Yes, honest people are good, but most people are equally honest, the rest being a bit careless with the truth. Nothing makes sense to me now, writing when I am pissed drunk at 3 in the morning… Nobody’s good, none’s bad, we all are ugly, ugliness prevailing under a delightful veneer of goodness….

That bright red spot

She walked in the class, a distracted lot looked on, whiling away their time, like chicken do when they are stuffed inside that rusted wire cage before being slaughtered, expressionless, not knowing what fate awaits them.

I looked up, waking up from my reverie, everything seemed hazy without my glasses, a woman strode in…draped impeccably in a sari. I’ve always maintained that a woman is closest to being naked when she’s well dressed…. our business journalism teacher someone hissed, as if I cared.

Clarity descended as soon as I put my glasses back on….all blurred edges assumed a definite shape, all the black ink on the board shrank meekly into boundaries, into recognisable text and so did her face……..

40-something, age stealing the thunder off her persona, leaving behind luxuriant pale skin, glowing with brilliance, slightly plump, mesmerising…..

Her eyebrows stretched; yawning into arches…perfect black lines they appeared, drawn with utmost care… with heavenly poise. And between those arches was a bindi, perfectly round and red, red as my blood.

I could have juxtaposed a graph paper on her face to find out the coordinates of that bindi; to confirm the symmetry and its linearity to those arches…..nothing seemed out of place. She spoke; I heard….never listening, my mind veered off to a parallel world all because of that damn bindi.

That bright red spot that I’d seen after so long on somebody not familiar traumatised me …flooding me…reminding me of the clay face of Maa Durga that we have in our drawing room…with big scary eyes, burning upon us. I was in a daze, if not a trance and that bright red spot continued to hog the attention.

Red stood for blood, for integrity, for life, for procreation…..its real meaning unknown…cloaked under mysteries. Through thousands of generations …immigrants, invaders, plunderers, colonisers have added their bit to it and it has flowed retaining its character, its meaning, undiluted, unrestricted.

And that circle? What did that signify? What else but that the earth is round and so is time. That time follows a damn pattern and it all starts where it ended, and that history blissfully repeats it self. Happiness and sorrow, victory and failure, everything’s a mere illusion. All lessons learnt are trifling; they all are in vain in the long run as the cyclical nature takes charge…..

What with the positioning….between the eyebrows, above the eyes, on the line of symmetry of the face…is that a coincidence too? I have often meditated with a yellow circle of incandescent light exactly on that spot as per the rules ….the yellow light relenting at first….. spreads over the rest of the body….is certainly divine. No wonder it is the divya chakshu of lord Shiva.
Mythology and commonsense seemed to converge making the picture a bit clearer and a hell lot complex. She rambled on about some boring details….oblivious of her fascinating bindi…and I gaped at her with child-like curiosity.

‘A Guide to Resolute Irresponsibility’

After a long time, today was a day which I enjoyed like no other, reading, imagining, soaking, sleeping and reading again. Day before, while browsing through the collection of the books in that newly discovered ‘pigeon-hole library’, I found myself staring at this seemingly harmless , pirated and decrepit copy of ‘ The memoirs of Protima Bedi’. On the cover page, beneath the stapled lamination, I found this black & white photograph of a middle aged lady, sporting a carefree laughter and a disproportionately huge red bindi.

As I browsed through the contents, I learnt that she was Kabir Bedi’s ex-wife, and something about her face said that she would be hugely controversial, and that this book would contain controversies replete with steamy sleaze with absolute strangers. I loved the idea and picked it up considering it to be a breezy read. And breezy it was, in more ways than one, the very first page contained graphic descriptions of how young Protima was raped by her cousin with his big paw under her panties!! But then the story changed, it became profound, and worse, I got sucked into the maelstrom of her life.

Her life story can easily fit in a paragraph. Born to a middle-class baniya family, she had always been a wild cat, stubborn, headstrong and eccentric. And thankfully, she was not a bong. Fell in love when she was 18, after some vain promises and a few hopeless tears she ran away from home and married Kabir Bedi while her boyfriend was away. Called her marriage ‘an open marriage’ and gave birth to her first child Pooja. Her marriage must have been a truly open one, as she didn’t know who had fathered her second child, Siddharth, a travelling guest or Kabir. Meanwhile Kabir exercised his share of openness while being busy with films. Walked out of this open formality and got divorced in her late 20’s. After having eloped with foreigners, musicians, politicians and lay-men alike and having loved each one of them passionately, she died under the crushing debris of a landslide, leaving behind a schizophrenic son who committed suicide, a divorced daughter and an unparallel legacy of an irresponsibly led life. She got fame as a model, a celebrity’s wife, a nudist, a talented dancer, an entrepreneur and finally a sanyasin. If I had the liberty to change the title of this book, I would call it – ‘A Guide to Resolute Irresponsibility’.

But I would still call it profound because it made me think, reflect and ponder. She wanted to be free, to explore, to go wherever her fancies took her and to do whatever her spirit demanded. She wrote with a lot of passion about the men in her life and how much she loved them all in the various phases of her life. To her, nothing was absolute, her body available to all, probably it was too good for any one individual to have! She forged relations with reckless abandon, she was the diva who shattered families including her own, with perfect harmony, her soul was true, unrestricted, unhindered, unshackled. Every third page of her memoir, right from her childhood to her final resting place under the landslide, she wept, mostly with her face buried under a pillow. The innocence of her memoirs is funny; I could only pity her helpless idiosyncrasies and all the men who came in her fold. I would recommend this book to anyone who thinks predictable, disciplined lives are boring and that we should live for change.

But she had the mettle to be a genius, as exhibited by the mastery of odissi dance form, and the establishment of ‘Nrityagram’, a village dedicated to dance near Bangalore. But alas, she suffered excruciatingly in her life, mostly on account of her unhindered spirit. I painfully read through the section when she leaves her kids alone, devoid of a father, taking her flights of fancy. I actually felt avenged when her son committed suicide, she deserved every bit of the suffering, the remorse, for snatching the childhood from her kids and for all the families she had shattered.

Well, of all the biographies that I’ve read, this one would easily qualify as the funniest and the scariest. It kindled all insecurities that I harboured about women and matrimony. The aggression with which I seethed after reading her memoirs was purely a defensive measure to protect myself against such maniacs.