Those days

The power went off early in the evening as I tried to put myself to sleep for a while. Droplets of sweat traversed like Morph Codes across my body, and I lay awake over the check bedsheet, hoping that a thunderstorm would saunter over.

Last night I felt so dead and rotten inside that I suspected maggots might come crawling out of my nostrils. With trembling hands then I took out that old cassette from its jacket scratched so badly as if mauled by a leopard, and put it inside the tape recorder.

It was noisy in the beginning, and from that cacophony emerged my own voice, trotting over the chocolate-coloured magnetic tape. In the autumn of 1995, I was reciting lines from A Moveable Feast:

For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit’s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabit’s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.

I am nineteen, and, as boys of my age buy greeting cards to woo girls, I am hoping that one day I could visit Hemingway’s grave in Ketchum, Idaho. Every day, I go to the Central Library, behind Chandigarh’s main market square, and get new books issued: Tolstoy. Chekhov. Turgenev. Flaubert. Marquez. Homer. Naipaul. Fitzgerald. Dickens. Neruda. Then, along a shop which has a round-the-year sale, I sit on a bench, holding a Nescafe coffee, and dream of having a café-au-lait with Hemingway.

I watch people pass by: chubby housewives buying cutlery, boys checking out new music albums, old men buying cheap literature on religion, prospectives brides getting their photographs clicked, and hungry workers eating from grimy plates. Then I leave and back at the hostel, I start reading.

By the time it is midnight, I am hungry. So, Gaurav Sharma and I go to Ranjan, who has a parantha stall next to General Hospital. We eat egg paranthas and two glasses each of strong tea. He lights up a cigarette and I also take a few puffs. We chat for a while and go back. He returns to his Statistics and Shiv Kumar Batalvi. I stay for a while, listening to Jagjit Singh pouring out Batalvi’s pain, and then I am reading again till the first light breaks.

That has been my life for many years. And now, thirteen years later, I long for those days. I long for companionship. I long for love.

And I long to leave a flask at Hemingway’s grave, as is the custom.

(Pic courtesy: Erik Hanberg)

Seven seas in Chandigarh

Memory is vision. Even when the summer heat in Delhi blinds me, I can clearly see a swirling ceiling fan and a wet floor. I can also hear songs from the ‘Bandit Queen.’ I go back to the summer of 1996, to Kamal’s room in Sector 15-B in Chandigarh. April and May meant long walks in the evening around the Sukhna Lake. They also meant milkshakes sweetened by Rooh Afza. Kamal’s landlord, an old Sikh widower, would be gone to his Kasauli retreat. In winters, we could see him, sitting in the compound of the ground floor, his feet resting on a cane stool, sipping his scotch silently in front of a fire. Come April and he would leave for Kasauli, only to come back in September. To sip more scotch, we thought.

We would lie on the clean bedsheets – Kamal and I – in his room and listen to Nusrat Sahab’s haunting voice. To turn the air cool, we sprinkled water on the floor. On the top floor lived a man who would be drunk throughout the day. He fought with his neighbours all the time. But we never troubled him and he never troubled us. He had two sweet little daughters, who we were his darlings. The man, we learnt later, was the son-in-law of a very famous Qawwal. He himself taught music at the local Girl’s college.

One day, Kamal was not there. I lay half awake, in perspiration, as the power supply had been cut off. Suddenly I heard two sweet voices, singing a song from one of the popular Bollywood flicks released during that time:

Maine kiye paar saat samandar…

I heard the entire song with closed eyes, completely mesmerised. When I looked out, I found the musician’s little daughters, wearing identical pink frocks, singing that song. Later, Kamal and I would make them sing the song a hundred times. It was during that time when the singer Vinod Sehgal came visiting his house and we came to know that in a few months’ time, Gulzar’s film Maachis was being released in which Sehgal had also sung a few numbers.

A few months later, our final exams came to an end and we had to bid goodbye to Chandigarh. A year or so later, a friend told us that the musician had passed away (he would not have been more than forty). In his place, his wife was offered the job.

Eleven years have passed and, in summers, when the electricity goes off, I sometimes hear that song:

Maine kiye paar saat samandar…