Shock Therapy

Probably by now you are tired of this: I have not been writing again.

On my work station, I have pinned up stuff, which I thought would prod me into clobbering my keypad every day: A September 1, 1952 cover of Life magazine, with Hemingway on it. The issue carries his entire novel, The Old Man and the Sea.

Then there are these two messages which are supposed to have been put by writer Philip Roth on his desk: Stay Put, No optional striving. There is also a poem from Dushyant Kumar, and an old picture from rural Kashmir.

But nothing has worked. The moment I sit at my desk, my hands turn limp, and lead gets filled into my arms and head. I feel sleepy as well.

I open a blank file on my desktop, and stare at the cursor, thinking of how to push through the debris of stillness. After a point of time, I give up. I go out, light a cigarette, and exchange words with colleagues. When I come back, Hemingway is looking grimly at me. I evade his stare.

It’s like this: I need to finish writing The Last Man from Kashmir. I have the story which I need to pour out in words.

Last night, I finished reading Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar. I wonder: do I need shock therapy, too?

Gandhigiri in Kashmir

The people of a tiny village in north Kashmir have won a small but decisive battle against the army, the first such example in twenty years of conflict.

The 15,000 residents of Bomai are not leaving their houses now, something they had threatened to do. There is word that three soldiers of the army’s Rashtriya Rifles will have to face disciplinary action for what happened in Bomai on February 21. The army camp, which was set up here in 1997, next to the girl’s high school, has also been shifted. There have been no incidents of stone pelting; no slogans have been raised in favour of Pakistan. In fact, during the agitation, the people of Bomai did not allow any politician from the mainstream or the separatist camp to set foot in their village. What the villagers have achieved could serve as an eye opener for everyone in the trouble-torn state, more so for the hard-line separatists.

It all began on the evening of February 21, when army soldiers from the local camp fired at three men near the main entrance of the village. Mohammed Amin Tantray (23) and Javid Ahmed (20) died due to bullet injuries while Nazir Ahmed was seriously injured. The locals say that it was a cold-blooded murder. A senior police source, however, termed it as a “genuine mistake”. It so transpired that there was a scuffle between two groups of youth at a local festival. When the army approached the men, who were coming back from the festival, they thought that they were being stopped by their rival group. Instead of stopping, they began to run away. The armymen should have exercised restraint. But, in a conflict zone like Kashmir, nobody wants to take chances. The soldiers fired at the men, resulting in two deaths.

Tantray’s elder brother, Mohammed Sultan, who is a post-graduate in mathematics, and teaches at the high school, remembers not feeling well that evening as a friend of his urged him to have another cup of the salty Kashmiri tea. And then the call came. Sultan rushed to the site, took his bleeding brother to the hospital, where he was declared brought dead. “I still can’t believe that he is gone. With his death, my father’s back bone has broken,” Sultan said. Sultan’s father sat next to him, silently shedding tears over the loss of his youngest son.


(Pic: Mohammed Sultan with other grieving members of his family)

The people were furious. It was not only the case of two men dying. The army camp where the soldiers fled to after the firing had been an eyesore for many years. The soldiers had erected bunkers on the wall along the school. They had made holes in the wall from where exhaust pipes jutted out, sending smoke inside the classrooms. Sumayya, a student recalls that some of the soldiers would shine mirrors at the girls, and make obscene gestures as well. After the deaths in the village, the villagers decided that enough was enough.

The same night the Bomai residents formed a coordination committee which spearheaded the agitation. “We were very clear that we won’t allow any separatist leader to hijack our issue,” says Hakimul Rahman Sultani, the head of the people’s committee. The villagers launched a peaceful movement, threatening at one time to vacate the entire village en masse if the army camp was not removed. There was not a single incident of violence during the agitation which lasted for thirteen days.

Ultimately, the authorities had to bow down. It also helped that a young chief minister had just taken over, who took up the issue with New Delhi. “But he could only pursue the case because the agitation was entirely non-violent and apolitical,” says a local observer.

The battle has been won. But the residents of Bomai are gearing up for other things as well. “We still haven’t been informed officially about the status of the inquiry or the quantum of punishment meted out to those responsible for the killing,” says Sultani. The villagers are also hoping that apart from the shifting of the army camp, other things in the village would move as well. “We will now push for the development of our village through the people’s committee,” says Ghulam Hassan Shah, a local resident.

For the families who lost their young members, there is little to cheer about. Tantray’s young niece, Anika trots around the house, searching for her. The elders know she won’t be able to see him ever. Tantray’s brother, Mohammed Sultan sits, along with other teaching staff, in the ground of the school. He has taken up to smoking heavily. “I think almost five packets a day,” he smiles sadly.
It is recess time, and a cricket match is going on between two classes. A girl hits the ball hard, and another, who like everyone else wears a headscarf, rushes after the ball. She picks it up near the wall where the bunkers once stood, managing to save a boundary.

It is a victory for cricket, if not anything else.

(An edited version of this story first appeared in Open Magazine - Page 22, 23. Click on http://openthemagazine.com/)

Line of Control

At an undisclosed location near the Line of Control in Kashmir

Ayodhya images

Hypergraphia

I long for Hypergraphia. I am tired of explaining my mood swings to others, and justifying it to myself. I am tired of everything. I am tired of reading. I am tired of drinking. I am tired of behaving normally. I am tired of being social. I am tired of remaining awake. I am tired of falling asleep.

The right knee is hurting again. That means I cannot run. Two nights ago, I was feeling terribly lonely. I sent smses to five people, asking them for a hug. One replied. The other replied the next day. One sent a blank sms back. And two didn’t reply at all. Hugs are premium, and people attach all kinds of meanings to them. Even hugs are not free. They are tagged, bound by cardinal rules of societal norms, used as a tool for barter by people. I don’t want them anymore.

Will be travelling tomorrow. Need to get out of this wretched city for few days. It is better to be among strangers in a stranger city. The people there don’t know you. They have no expectations. They will leave you alone. Even when there is a conversation, there will be no background to it.

I hate backgrounds, too.

I want to do this: flee to the mountains. Cook a nice meal. Lie down on a haystack in sunshine. Listen to Agha Shahid Ali reciting his poetry. Converse with the old postman. Put my head under a brook. Light a pipe. Play with mud.

Write feverishly, in long hand.

Hypergraphia.

Just another day

Today has also passed by. I got up in the morning, and went for a run around the neighbourhood track. While I was at it, five airplanes flew overhead. I wondered who was in them and where all did they arrive from or were going to. Then I sat for a while on a broken bench. At my feet lay two empty bottles of mineral water and an empty packet of potato chips. Someone must have had something to rejoice for or feel sorry about. Or he must have been drinking just like that, just like me.

At ten I went to a dentist friend who has taken up the task of ridding me of all dental ailments. He injected some local anesthesia, and suddenly my right cheek and a portion of tongue went numb. He then drilled into a tooth and filled it with what tastes like white cement (I think). He then offered me a nice cup of tea, and we talked for long about retirement plans and back-strengthening exercises.

Then I went to office, and read a few newspapers, edited an article, and checked few websites. I also browsed through my e-mail. Then I had a few spoons of rice with potatoes, politely declining a colleague’s offer of sharing a mutton Biryani.

Towards evening, I went to my favourite bookshop, and bought three books. Then I went to a café which I used to frequent earlier with a beloved, who I think still loves me but is no longer mine. I declined many offers of the girl at the counter to have coffees laced with chocolate and ice-cream. Instead, I had my usual cold coffee sans any embellishments. Something open up within, and I wrote furiously for about forty minutes. Then I experienced hot flushes and started to shake.

At first I thought it was due to a strong dose of caffeine. Then I thought I was having a heart attack. I thought of calling a few friends who I knew were drinking beer at a nearby pub. But then more than fifteen minutes passed and I was still alive, and I could still hold a pen between my fingers.

The feeling still hasn’t gone completely as I write this, and it is already midnight. I intend to resume reading Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons after this. The Internet at home is not working. So, I shall be posting this in the morning from my office.

If you are reading this, that means I am still around.

I haven’t had a drink since five days. I think it’s just withdrawal symptoms.

Or may be I have just grown old.

Lovers like that

The city sleeps like an old man with blocked sinuses. In deep slumber it seems to rise, monster like, producing sinewy sound. That is when he gets up, and in the darkness, he sits in the balcony, taking care to hide himself from the drunk watchmen who assemble every now and then outside his house, making lewd comments about women. A marriage party is passing somewhere nearby, and there is a distinct sound of a brass band playing old filmi songs. One of them is about a lover beseeching the breeze to shower flowers over his beloved.

He has been a lover himself; he realises what it does to men – this thing called love. He is turning old now. Days pass by, one by one, leaving wrinkled footsteps underneath his eye sockets. His back has given away, and his hands tremble with excitement or even without. And like the city, his sinuses are blocked, too.

An hour ago his friends have left. Friends who sell plastic and write poetry. Friends who are about to become parents. Friends who are diabetic. Friends who have witnessed neighbours killing neighbours. Friends who have too much alcohol and don’t speak a word. He juggles through them, his own poison in his hands, and a cigarette held between his lips. He sings for them, sometimes, when the music within him becomes overbearing. He sings for them when he cannot handle the love he has within himself.

In bhool bhullaiya galiyon mein
Apna bhi koi ek ghar hoga
Ambar pe khulengi khidkiyan
Khidki se khula ambar hoga…

And now they have left. There are empty glasses everywhere. The floor is strewn with food crumbs and cigarette ash. A phone charger hangs from a plug. The walls smell of perfume. There are shoe marks on the rug.

After they are gone, he just lies down on his back, in the middle of the room. He looks at the ceiling fan which badly needs dusting. He closes his eyes. Home. House. Here. There. He doesn’t belong anywhere. He just needs to love. But now, there is no one to be loved.

That is when he gets up, and in the darkness, he sits in the balcony. Thinking of love, flowers and old filmi songs. The city snores all around him.

Morpankh

Posted here.

Cotton Candy Man

The script, the plot

I wish you were here. Or I were there. Or both of us were somewhere. The high gardens of my imagination lie barren. I need to talk to you. About words. About restlessness. About fear. About an injury in my knee. About Frangipani. About the bright green tint of a Carlsberg beer bottle. About sleepiness.

The other day you came to the café. I spoke a little out of anxiety.

“Baat karne aaye ho kya?”

I looked at you, inside you. I went silent. You stirred your coffee. You cried silently. I later told someone that we had met. He enquired about you, wanting to know whether you were happy. With you one never knew, I told him. He nodded. He understood.

Happiness is not for us. We are seekers – of what lies ahead of happiness. Of what lies beneath it.

Frangipani can only exist in our imagination. The high gardens of our lives will stay barren.

That is the script; that is the plot.

Family Tree

I know nothing about my family beyond my great grandfather. My grandfather, who was a Sanskrit scholar, and who dabbled in astrology as well, died in the November of 1985. A day before he died, he had been shifted to a hospital. I remember my mother had come home in the evening after visiting him, and, in the night, as my father prepared to lay our beds, she advised him against it. “We won’t require them,” she said. True to her word, a little after midnight, the message came from the hospital. Grandfather had passed away in his sleep with my eldest uncle by his side.

I was too young then – a boy, who would turn ten coming February. And I had no inclination towards knowing about my ancestors. It was only after my grandmother’s death in 2003 that my ignorance turned into a void. I had just returned from Baghdad after covering the war for a news channel. I remember looking at my ailing grandmother, who lay in her bed, her breath running up and down her chest like a squirrel.

The next morning, I left for Benares. The same night, she passed away.

I remember feeling nothing about it after I had kept down the phone. Death, no matter whose it is, leaves my father shaken. I remember offering to return immediately even when I didn’t really mean it. Father, I suppose, didn’t want to ruin my trip.

“Don’t worry, I’ll manage,” he said, while trying to hold back, in vain, his anxiety.

I didn’t turn up for the cremation. After I returned, two days later, I remember sitting at the spot where my grandmother had breathed her last. Still, I felt nothing.

A year later, I began researching for my novel, set around the 1947 tribesmen attack on Kashmir. My maternal uncle – a boy of ten in 1947 – was in the north Kashmir town of Baramulla when the tribesmen came in buses, entering through the border town of Uri and plundering it. Baramulla came next.

One muggy evening, in June 2004, my maternal uncle and I sat on a sofa, in the backdrop of a noisy air-conditioner.

And then he began telling me about his life.

It was till dawn that he told me about those days – on how, along with the Mahura power station, their lives were plunged into darkness. The conversation – one way most of the time – continued for almost a week. He returned to Jammu, where he lives in a one-bedroom flat, nursing his diabetic wife, after their only son was dragged out of the bus by terrorists, in 1997, and shot dead. I kept on asking him, over phone from Delhi, and in person whenever I visited Jammu or when he revisited us, till a complete picture of the family from my mother’s side was evolved.

A majority of those memories forms the basis of my novel.

In the past five years or so, I have made many enquiries about my paternal side. Most of the knowledge I have acquired doesn’t go beyond my grandfather. My youngest uncle, who in his youth has experimented with writing and theatre, and who retired last year from active government service, blames his two elder brothers for lack of interest. He says he was too young when his father and mother could have spoken about the family. I don’t completely buy that argument but I can’t blame him or his two elder brothers. All of them spent their lives – first in establishing themselves in their respective positions and saving money for the construction and, later, the renovation of the house they painstakingly built in what was then a Srinagar suburb, and then dealing with the post-exile trauma in much part of the 1990s, after driven out of the valley.

Today, all I know about my great grandfather is that he was named after the preserver in the Hindu trinity – Lord Vishnu. He was fond of opium and became a widower shortly after my grandfather was born. In fact, I have learnt that after my grandfather was born, he fell seriously ill. His distraught mother – my great grandmother, is believed to have prayed to the God to spare his life and instead take hers.

The same day, she passed away. A day later, my grandfather’s condition improved considerably, and he lived up to his mid seventies. So, whole my grandfather spent his life in the service of the language of the Gods, his father lay dazed in Opium smoke, flirting with married women in the neighbourhood. He had many lovers, and spent most of his time reciting Kashmiri poetry to them.

As a young man, when I would write passionate letters to the women I fell in love with (which was quite often), my father would sometimes discover them, and then remark that I was a reincarnation of my great grandfather.

I am sure he must have also suspected me of experimenting with Opium.

I have two New Year resolutions. One, I strive to write every day. Two, I will visit the holy city of Haridwar and get a family tree made.

I better learn more about a man called Vishnu.

May be I could learn a trick or two about love as well.

Yet another

The response to my Hindi poems has been so poor that I have been contemplating blog suicide. But before I do that, here is another:

तुम्हारे उजले तलवों से दिन निकल आया है
मेरे स्याह माथे पर रात अभी लहराई है
मेरे सीने की नदी में पाँव डालकर देखो
इसकी कितनी गहराई है

I invite readers to share their own poems - in Hindi and English, which has
mention of sole(s), the bottom of the foot.

For Maya

First, my apologies. It has taken me a while to post some of my poems even after receiving many responses. Actually I had been travelling again, with no access to the Internet. Anyway, here they are, four of them. I hope you like them. Do let me know.

Also, one clarification: though I am a fan of Gulzar, the name Maya is not inspired by the usage of the name in some of his films. Maya is my muse, an imaginary seductress who visited Vincent Van Gogh in his delirium (Please do read Irving Stone's magnificent biography of Van Gogh, Lust for Life, and you will know what I mean).

Thank you.

अकेलेपन का शोर अलग होता है
वो कानों में नही बजता
वो बजता है मन की मुंडेरों पर
संगीतबद्ध होने से बचता

उसे सुनकर बच्चे पीछे नही लगते
न ही गेहूँ बीनती औरतें
सर उठाकर देखती है
काले तवे सा बस वो चपटा होता है
जिसपर आँखें समय सेंकती है
और...
स्मृति पथराये बिस्तर पर
करवट-करवट रेंगती है

सिन्धु सी आवाज़ करता वो
तो मैं भी सिंह सा गरजता
पर...
अकेलेपन का शोर अलग होता है
वो कानों में नही बजता
***
मेरी हथेलियों पर
लकीरें नही
तुम्हारे आने-जाने के
निशान हैं
***
जब शाम घिर आती है
तो क्या
मेरे बारे में सोचती हो?
उस सरफिरे बाज़ार में
आँखें घुमाकर
क्या मुझे खोजती हो?

जब मैं नही दिखता तो
क्या कंधे भारी हो जाते हैं?
या काफ़ी के प्याले में
घड़ियाल नज़र आते हैं?
***
कानपुर से लौट आई हो
सूटकेस में
खांसी भर लायी हो
"क्या कर रही हो?"
"खों खों... अनपैक"

जी करता है
तुम्हारे गाल पर
विक्स में चुपडी हथेली से
एक थप्पड़ रसीद दूँ.

(CROSS POSTED HERE)

Fancy a Hindi poem?

I have been trying to write poems in Hindi for a proposed collection. I need to have at least one hundred poems. By now, I have managed about thirty. I like some of them. I have destroyed some of them after finding them ridiculous. May be a few others also meet the same fate.

All these poems are about love and longing, and are dedicated to my muse, the ultimate seductress, Maya. I intend to call the collection: Laut aao, Maya (Come back, Maya).

Actually, there is one small poem, which ends like this:

Tum bhi to kabhi
dil pe
chot khao, Maya
Laut aao, Maya

Most of the poems have been written in trains and in Delhi’s auto rickshaws. And in pubs across India with names like Flames, Bistro, 4S, Beach Bar, Arabian Nights, Gomti. I cannot write, or for that matter, do anything else during air travel – I suffer from a terrible flight phobia. My legs turn numb and cold sweat oozes out of my palms. Put me in a conflict zone, and I am the most courageous person you’d have ever seen. But an aircraft – that scares me.

But this poetry collection is not what is keeping me busy. I am giving finishing touches to a book on insurgency, which I am writing along with my dear friend, Neelesh. Once that is done, I would like to go back to my novel, The Last Man from Kashmir. It is half done. Recently, I showed some parts of it to another friend, who also happens to be a writer. He liked it very much.

But the question, my dear readers, is: will you like it?

Thank you for stopping by. And ah, one more news. Recently, one of my Hindi stories got published in a magazine called Lamhi. It is edited by Mr. Vijai Rai, the grandson of legendary Hindi writer, Munshi Premchand.(Lamhi is a village near Varanasi where the great writer was born). In Delhi, it is available at the bookshop of the Sri Ram Centre.

PS: Do you want me to post one of my Hindi poems here? I don’t know whether Mac supports Hindi font. But if I get more than ten readers to say, YES, they want to read it, I will post the poem.

Alien cities

After the old waiter, wearing a haggard bow tie, kept my luggage on the table, I tipped him and locked the room behind him. It was an old hotel, and there were rumours that it would soon be dismantled to give way to a shopping mall. The paint had been peeling off the walls, and the damp bed covers reeked of lovemaking. The fan moved about its wobbly wings and the television set’s volume control lay broken. The window, overlooking a residential apartment, would not close properly and the curtains were torn off at several places.

I put my hand inside the crevice of the old sofa and discovered a bunch of cinema tickets of a film twenty years old. For some time, I could hear noise in the corridor and then it died down. There was silence.

In alien cities, in hotel rooms like these, the feeling of loneliness is most intense.

I had come prepared for this. So, as I lowered my back partially over the sofa, I took out a cigarette and, as the ice bucket arrived, I poured myself Vodka in a shallow glass made for consuming tea. Then I senselessly watched television for some time, letting the extra volume drown me into it. Then I flung its remote somewhere.

The curtains swirled under the fan. Two poems lay unfinished in a small diary, stuffed in my jeans pocket. Words had been failing me. Newspapers, which lay on my bed, made no sense. I didn’t have the patience to read the book on the table, leaning against a thermos. I ended up drinking too much, letting the alcohol drift me towards sleep.

In the morning, I woke up with a headache. The ashtray was full – the cigarette ash had filled the gaps last night. The remote lay sulking in one corner. A new set of newspapers had been slid through. The jeans lay in a heap on the chair, with the unfinished poems still unfinished. I closed my eyes.

In alien cities, in hotel rooms like these, the feeling of loneliness is most intense.

Lucknow Railway Station

Copyright: rahul pandita@2008

Shami Kabab and Inclusive Growth

Wrote a piece in Hindi for Mohalla. You can see it here.

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)

Burn the dreams

Can we burn the dreams again?
So that poems are born
They need canvasses of bodies
To illuminate words and
Whatever meanings they hold
In their varicose veins.

Travels through Kashmir

Copyright: Rahul Pandita, 2008