Could I ever sleep?

On the road below
They keep on creating noise:
Hawkers looking for
Stale newspapers and empty
Whisky bottles
Beggars masquerading as ascetics
With a tin God immersed in mustard oil
Salesmen selling aluminum foil
And those who clean gas burners
And herbs for slow learners

I try to sleep
Over yesterday’s headlines
And hangover induced at midnight
And the stains that won’t purge
But the shouts that emerge
From the road below
Won’t let me sleep

A child begins crying too
And a scooter won’t start
A plane also flies overhead
While I toss and turn in the bed

During the night too
Someone snored in the other room
And the walls won’t keep it
To themselves
The sound kept on tumbling in
From racks and shelves

Can I sleep peacefully now?
Or do I have to wait till
I turn old
To sleep in my grave
Without hearing a whimper
As if in my ears
They have poured
Molten gold

The man with a tie

I like it when people pay attention to my stories. For a living I sell medicines – promote them, to be precise – but my real talent, if you really ask me, lies in storytelling.

Six days a week, I wear a tie brought from the underground Palika bazaar, comb my hair backwards, eat my breakfast of two boiled eggs (except Tuesdays), wash it down with a glass or a cup of tea, depending on my wife’s mood, and then make rounds of clinics and hospitals with my leather bag, telling doctors that the medicines and drugs produced by my pharmaceutical company are God’s gift to mankind.

Some of them are busy treating patients and ask me to come later. But some of them invite me in. They shift uneasily on their chairs while I tell them about new medicines introduced in the market. They quickly take free samples I offer, putting them inside drawers.

“And, what else?” the moment one of them asks me this, I assume my hidden role and regale him with my stories. There are so many anecdotes I know. Like about this neighbour of mine who dropped his wife from the back of his scooter in the midst of a bustling market and drove straight home, only to find his wife missing. It is rumoured that she did not come back for six months, choosing to stay back at her parents’ house. Or about this friend of mine who attended a meditation session and, afterwards, began to suspect that his mother was a monster. Or about this distant relative of mine who committed suicide one wintry afternoon. He was ironing his trousers as he waited for an official pick up. He had ironed one of the legs when he suddenly decided to end his life and did so by hanging himself with a Bombay Dyeing bed sheet.

Sometimes, I invent my own stories. I cook them up. Sometimes, I also offer diagnosis to doctors who know me for long now. Recently, one such young doctor looked sullen when I entered into his room. This doctor is also a writer, or at least he claims to be one. Behind him there hangs a portrait of Ernest Hemingway. Between thick medical encyclopaedias stacked on a shelf he has kept copies of The Old Man and the Sea and A Moveable Feast.

The young man is restless as I can see. I rub my fingers on my striped tie – the two fingers of my right hand between which I hold cigarettes. The fingertips have almost turned yellow and they perpetually smell of cigarette smoke. Adjusting the knot of my tie, I speak to him.

“Doctor sahab, it seems you are stressed out with work. I think you badly need a vacation,” I throw the bait.

He lets out a guttural laugh. He takes out his spectacles and keeps them gently on the table. “Do you really think so?” he asks. And then without waiting for my answer, he continues.

“Actually what I need right now is to be able to spend time with a
like-minded person who is either a painter or a writer. She (There he goes, I think, so he has facing difficulty with his spouse) and I could go somewhere in hills where we could create our own mini workshop. She could do her own thing and so would I and, in the evening, we could go for long walks, drink tea at roadside stalls.”

I see dreams floating in his eyes. Then I know that this is the time.

“Let me tell you a story, Sir, about this man who had this habit of rubbing his fingers over his tie…” And so I begin…

Our own Kolkatas

In the miasma of darkness, cars moved along the tall building. Their high-beam lights shone on the glass façade for a moment and then moved away quickly. Men did not have that virtue. They would slither through silently, some of them on rickety bicycles, their bottoms turned sore by cushion-less seats.

From the third-floor window of a restaurant, he watched it all – the grand trapezium of light and darkness, muscle and bone. The cigarettes, one after another, weighed heavily on his chest, like a secret kept for long. The dark rum numbed the pain in his lower abdomen. But it would return, as it did every night, keeping him awake to nurse hopelessness.

By the time he was on the road back home, the city had been put to sleep. Towards his left, the Qutab Minar stood absolutely still, its reverie broken at times by honking drivers who probably were in a hurry to reach home or elsewhere. But nothing awaited him; he was in no hurry.

In few hours, the flower market adjacent to the monument would buzz to life. Florists would arrive and haggle for better rates. Afterwards, they would carry huge bunches of flowers on their scooters. Later in the day, people would buy them for sustaining love affairs, decorating marriage venues, brightening up small office cubicles and even for feeling good while shitting in bathrooms.

A little ahead, frail men, wearing bright, fluorescent helmets on their heads, worked in an almost geometric pattern, trying to build a metro rail system for the people of the city. Many of its users would consist of men from their own villages, from the eastern part of the country, who would have gone to Kolkata once upon a time but now chose Delhi to be able to send modest money orders.

Eiy sajni re, eiy sajni re, eiy sajni
Piya gayen Kalkatwa eiy sajni
Kaisen chalan rahetwa, eiy sajni

How would it work for young brides when their grooms went away, a few days after marriage, to far and distant lands, only to come back once a year, or once in five years, or never? When the rain arrived, would they let it needle their anaemic skin?

He stopped his car. A car whizzed past him. Then another. He counted them for a minute or so. His last count came to around eleven. Or may be it was twelve. He opened the back of his car and took out a half-finished bottle of rum.

No one he knew had gone to Kolkata. But Kolkata, sometimes, could also be a state of mind. And now, he needed to find his own needles.

(Pic courtesy: Preeti Paul Kannath)

Let's remember each other by name

I have this very strong belief that all stories deserve to be told. For a
story-teller, imagination is like a whore. She entices him with fake lipstick. But despite her sagging breasts sometimes, a story-teller must conscript with her. He must be a debauch, or at least, act like one.

I have told you many stories. Sometimes you get too entangled into it. There are times when you think that every story I tell comes from my own life. Well, it may be true in some cases but most of the times it is my imagination which runs amok. When it takes a leap, I am forced to run along lest I be left behind. That, my reader, is the essence of my life. I am not capable of anything else except imagining (I may also produce exceptionally-well brewed tea or a finely garnished omelette at times). I spend most of my time day dreaming.

Let me tell you about this character of mine. He is a young man, let us say, in his early thirties, who knows a girl who is few years younger to him. They have never met in person; they have never known each others’ voices. And yet, they are very close. They share intimate details of life with each other. Probably also because they are separated with a veil of anonymity. I mean, they know each other, but only through SMS or an occasional e-mail.

One day, as the man lay on the top berth of a train, he feels alone. The train is taking him to a place where he has spent few years many years ago. The man wishes that all the faces he remembers would just fade away. A curtain is drawn across his berth and he lays half awake, trying to take stock of his life. His strongest urge, he realises, is to be able to lie next to someone. And then he remembers her.

“You remind me of hot chocolate,” he sends her a message.

She replies and thus begins a string of conversation that extends till wee hours of the morning. The girl confides in him, as usual, telling the man about a boy whom she is in love with. But she says she fears that she might lose him. She is a compulsive dreamer and is taken aback, sometimes, with the boy’s practicality.

“I want to grow old with him,” she writes.

The man realises that his dreams are similar to that of the girl. He doesn’t want to be rich and nor does she. She loves rain and so does he. He feels like putting her head in his lap and read poetry to her.

“I am knitting a sweater for him,” she writes.

All his life the man has waited for someone who would knit a sweater for him, like one of those characters in a Russian novel which he has read as a boy.

“Let us meet,” he tells her, “but we won’t speak to each other; we will just converse through writing. We will meet at a fixed place and may be sit in front of each other in a café.”

“But you will hear me when I ask for a mocha,” she replies.

“No, we will just point it out to the waiter.”

“I am smiling in the dark,” she writes back. He smiles too.

After he reaches home, he collects scraps of paper on which he could write and converse with the girl. She goes home to clean and feed a friend who is staying with her.

They might meet soon.

Not me. He. And her.

At the Oxford Book Store

Speaking at the Oxford Book Store, Delhi during a discussion on Media Nagar 03.

"Writing is the most exciting thing in my life"

He teaches Marketing at the Oxford University, but if you read his three novels, you might take him for a historian. Unlike some of the Indian writers in English, his stories do not drip with nostalgia. A CPM cardholder in the 70s in West Bengal, Kunal Basu, by his own admission, is no longer a Communist. His latest work, a collection of twelve short stories, titled, The Japanese Wife is being made into a film by filmmaker Aparna Sen. In Delhi for the launch of his book, Basu spoke to me on subjects ranging from writer’s discipline to the changing world order.

A reader of yours made a comment about you recently, and I quote: “History seems to be his only fetish.” Does your latest work, in some way, try to break that mould?

Kunal Basu: It is very curious comment. The collection of short stories is different from my earlier works because these are all contemporary stories. There is a story in this collection called The Accountant which has deep historical coonections. But, in a way, yes, it is different from my earlier novels.

You have written about hundred articles in Marketing and you also teach Consumer Behaviour and Brand Strategy. How do you manage to juggle between your life as an academic and that of a novelist?

KB: I am passionate about my writing; I have always been an author at heart. The choice of a professional or academic career was to some extent circumstantial. We Indians, more than anybody else, should realise that our career choices often don’t reflect our true passions. At the time I was growing up in India in 70s, if you did not become a doctor or an engineer, most likely you became unemployed. As a middle class Indian boy, I studied subjects that really didn’t interest me as much as others. So when actually I should have studied literature, history and things like that, I studied science and engineering. And that took me down to a certain career path. I am not saying that my current academic job is completely uninteresting to me, but if given a choice I would have done it differently. And how do I manage the two worlds? I try to manage the academic writing and literary writing by being very disciplined in what I do. I also try not to think too much about the difference.

Your first novel is about opium and as per your own admission, you have never tasted opium. The second novel’s protagonist is a bisexual, and you are not one. Where do you get the inspiration for your characters?

KB: I do not write surface autobiography; some of us do. How can I take bits of my own life and that of people around me and turn it into a novel! The inspiration for a story comes from most unlikely places. Grateful Ganga, for instance, is a story which began forming in my mind after I read a small, little newspaper report about Jerry Garcia’s (Rock star) wife coming to India to sprinkle his ashes on the Ganga. And that was all that there was to the story. And I started seeing images of this woman arriving with the ashes. So inspirations from life, interacting with people, snatches of conversation, newspaper reports, day dreaming – that is how stories are born in my mind.

You grew up in Kolkata, and both your parents were really into activism. You were yourself a cardholder of the CPM during the heady days of Naxalism. Have those days in any way shaped what you are today?

KB: Very much. Not the politics, I am not a Communist anymore, but – let me answer it this way – if I hadn’t taken part in student politics, I would not have had an exposure to aspects of life which tremendously benefited me as an author. It would have been very easy for me to go through life or substantial parts of my life being very comfortable; afterall I had come from a middle-class household. I was reasonably well-educated and I had been to good universities. I could have spent my life in offices, in movie halls, golf courses, cafes, but life in politics took me to places that were outside my comfort zone. It took me to people whose living conditions are very different, very difficult - absolutely poor people, people at the edges of the poverty. It exposed me to a whole range of human sensations that otherwise I would not have been exposed to. So I owe a lot to my upbringing, although the politics of that period does not remain with me.

And why is it so? What has changed really?

KB: Sadly, the world has changed. If you read Lenin’s Café (One of Basu’s stories), in some way it hints to that. The world has changed dramatically in the last couple of decades. And some of the things we took forgranted are no longer valid. The ways with which we saw our friends and enemies and so-called friends and so-called enemies, have changed. I no longer subscribe to a particular political philosophy because I have seen that, perhaps, it would not deliver the kind of society that I would prefer for myself and for people around me. But what has remained from that period is deep compassion for the underprivileged. And in many of things that I write, it seeps in.

We have this huge debate in India whether artists – writers, filmmakers, painters – should be turning to activism at all. Do you think a writer like yourself can detach himself from what is happening in his society?

KB: Nowhere in life and in any society at any point in time has one been able to build a wall between art and life. And why would you want to build that wall! When you are writing something, obviously you are commenting on society and the way people live. It is absolutely fine to do that. People can take issue with that; you can say that I disagree and say I do not like the way you have portrayed a certain reality. And that’s fine too. The world of art is the world of debate and arguments. One would hope that such debates and arguments are conducted in a civilised fashion. But you would want your authors to address substantial issues. What else would they be writing about?

There is this impression that the Indian Diaspora basically writes what we term as “nostalgic fiction” about India. Do you think that assessment is true, or fair?

KB: This field of Indian writers writing in English is so vast – you have got people like Salman Rushdie on the one hand and Arundhati Roy on the other. How on earth can anyone draw any generalisations from that! In fact, the generalisation is often made in the West and we Indians shouldn’t make that generalisation. There are so many different genres, so many different stories; I don’t think Amitava Ghosh’s novels are about nostalgia at all. Certainly, my writing is not about India. I have not left behind India, I have just gone travelling.

Salman Rushdie once remarked that writers writing in English in India are producing far more important body of work than the regional writers. What is your take on this?

KB: I completely disagree; the best Indian authors write in vernacular. I am a bilingual author – my early short stories and poems have been in Bangla. It is an outrageous statement for Rushdie to have made because, one: he doesn’t know and read and speak all Indian languages. All regional literature doesn’t get translated in a very stylish way around the world. It doesn’t win major prizes but that doesn’t diminish it any way.

What does your knowledge about consumer behaviour tell you about the present-day India?

KB: India is in the grasp of a consumerist culture that we have never seen before in the past. I am not saying all of India because all of India is not privileged and financially well-off. But the middle and the upper middle class is consuming with a passion and that has really changed the face of urban India in a significant way.

There was a time when you told someone in India that you were a writer and his next question would be: Wo to theek hai magar karte kya ho? Do you think that opinion about writers has changed here in India?

KB: Actually it hasn’t changed and it hasn’t changed in the whole world. I am given to understand that about 95 percent of all published authors in the English language, worldwide, have a day job. I am one of the 95 percent. Even the Indian authors I meet in various literary festivals, most of them have a day job.

Rembrandt once said: Not a single day without a line. Though he said that in context of painting, that holds more or less true for writing also. How discilplined are you as a writer? Do you write everyday? What is your writing pattern?

KB: Writing is the most exciting thing in my life. I wake up in the morning to run to my Study to start writing. Either I am writing text, or reading for my writing or taking notes, this is something which I do everyday – this is not something which is done certain time or certain days or certain weeks.

Your literary agent, I believe, keeps on asking you about your “Bengal” book? Is it coming?

KB: There are some Bengal stories in my story collection but after I put them together I was really surprised that there are more Delhi stories than there are Bengal stories. I am not at this point of time thinking – I might at some point of time – of sitting down and consciously writing a Bengal story. As a matter of fact, I do not write anything by first identifying a theme and then say, okay, I want to write about opium, what’s the story! I do it the other way. When I think of a story, I say, well, this is exciting, let’s do it.

The Japanese Wife is already much-talked about, also because it is a film now. Do you think that film as a medium does justice to stories such as yours?

KB: This is not new, vast number of films have been made out of novels. Look at India, Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay is perhaps the most-filmed Indian novelist. Sometimes you have got brilliant adaptations of mediocre stories; sometimes you have bad adaptations of great stories. But I am very much in love with Cinema; I have been connected with cinema as a child actor for Mrinal Sen. I am a film buff.

What next ? Have you begun thinking about what to do next?

KB: I have started work on my next novel set in India, but I am not prepared to say anything more than that right now.

(An edited version of this appeared first in The Sunday Indian weekly. Pic: Mukund Dey)

On suicide, Wandhama and, perhaps, everything else in life

This evening, a middle-aged man with receding hairline jumped from the top floor of my office building and died on the floor, next to a promotional board of Johnie Walker which reads: Keep walking. His one shoe lay near his motionless body.

People watched him from a distance. By the time someone called the police, a pool of blood was created beneath his face. The man was wearing a jacket and a pair of blue jeans. While I sat in my office, discussing literature with a friend, the man must have decided to take the final plunge.

I don’t know who this man is. Probably he was not an employee of any of the offices in the building. Probably he was an outsider who just climbed the fifth floor to end his life. Probably he was tired of life. Probably he loved it too much.

N was with me when this happened, and like me, he also rushed out after hearing the commotion. When we entered back into my room, we just sat there, perhaps avoiding each other’s gaze. I tried calling an ambulance service in the hope that the man might be actually alive. I could not connect. I switched off my computer.

As we left office, N and I, we passed by the man. The police was yet to arrive. The crowd of spectators had grown thick. N mumbled something – something about the inefficiency of police. I thought the man’s family, if he had any, still did not know. Probably his son would be playing cricket. His wife would be watching television, getting ready to cook their
dinner – probably his favourite dish. And the man is no more.

Driving back home, I tell two friends about it. One of them laughs. I reach home. I pour myself a stiff drink. I gulp it down. I open my laptop. I make another drink.

P has downloaded some new songs. As I browse through them, I realise that she surely doesn’t have the inclination to listen to at least three songs she has downloaded. Probably she has downloaded them for me. But she hasn’t been able to tell me that for twenty-seven days now.

The police must have arrived by now. They would have removed his body. How would they ascertain who he is? Probably he has a mobile phone. Or may be, they find his visiting cards in his wallet. May be, he has a driver’s license.

Ten years have passed today since a 16-year-old boy saw his father, mother, sister and his neighbours being killed in front of his eyes. It happened in Wandhama , in Kashmir valley. The boy’s family begged the killers to spare them but they had come with a clear task: annihilate the few Hindu families who had chosen not to leave their home and hearth. The 23 dead included four children. That boy was the lone survivor. Where is he now? The case has been closed, as a newspaper report tells me. But who will close the memory gates of that boy?

Did that man look at the Johnie Walker board as he entered into the building? If only he had – may be, he would have been walking towards his home right now.

There is a knock at my door. I am being called for dinner.

Friends don't die

“He was carrying his revolver when they shot him dead.” The old caretaker at the Ghadar Memorial Hall in Jalandhar takes out a blue handkerchief and spreads its content on the table. There is an old spectacles frame and a blood-stained bus ticket, recovered from Darshan Canadian’s shirt pocket.
“The problem with Comrades is that they are very fond of justifying their viewpoint. When the two young men waylaid him, he got into an argument with them instead of taking out his revolver,” an old associate of Canadian tells us. It was on September 25, 1986 when Darshan Canadian was shot dead by Khalistani terrorists.

In Punjab, the wounds have healed more or less. One deadly decade of terrorism has passed since long. Beyond Punjab, people only know of a super cop and a chief minister who finally led the Khalistani dream to its nemesis. But in Punjab, those who actually offered resistance to the movement without being protected by gun-toting policemen, are part of the folklore, much like Bhagat Singh. These are a handful of Comrades, like Darshan Canadian, who laid down their lives fighting religious fundamentalism. These were the men who were armed only with idealism.

In village Talwindi Salem, the mango tree still exists. Sukhwinder Singh Sandhu takes me there. At first, he talks in a matter-of-fact manner. And then his eyes turn wet. Sandhu vividly remembers that sunny morning on March 23, 1988, when he left his cousin Avtaar Singh ‘Paash’ and his friend Hansraj near the mango tree at the family tubewell. “When we heard the gunshots, Paash’s mother thought that the nearby cold storage was on fire. But I knew “saade ghar te aag lagi hai (it’s our house which has been set afire.)”

The most dangerous thing is to be filled with stillness/Not to feel any agony and bear it all/Leaving home for work and from work return home/The most dangerous thing is the death of our dreams… These lines by Paash, considered by many as Punjab’s most influential revolutionary poet is, in a way, a reflection of his combativeness. In the mid-`80s Paash was the cheerleader of resistance against Punjab terrorism.
Through his writings, he had become a festering wound for fundamentalism. From America, where he had shifted in 1985, he took out Anti-47, a magazine that opposed those who supported Khalistan. “In his village, his friends had advised him to go underground since he was on the hitlist of terrorists,” remembers Sukhwinder. But he had refused. It was on that morning in 1988 when acting upon a tip-off, terrorists lay their hands upon Paash and his friend. After being hit by a bullet on his hand, Paash tried to ecsape but fell down near the mango tree. The terrorists pumped an entire burst into his head. Hansraj was also killed nearby. Paash was 38. Fifty-seven years ago, on the same day, Bhagat Singh had achieved martyrdom.

Not very far from where his brother fell to bullets, Harbans Lal sits in his newly-built bigger home, trying to remember his brother’s journey. “Hansraj was very close to Paash and even in their death they were together,” he says. After Hansraj’s death, the village elders advised him to sell off his land and settle down somewhere else. “But that would have been an insult to Hansraj’s martyrdom,” says Harbans Lal. After his son’s death, their father stopped working in the family fields. In the memory of his late brother, Harbans Lal encouraged his son to become a weightlifter. (“I wanted him to be as physically strong as Hansraj was mentally”).

In retaliation to these killings, their comrades killed a woman and her father in Talwindi Salem. The woman, a supporter of Khalistan, is believed to have passed on information about Paash’s location to his killers.

In Majha area – the worst-affected area during militancy – Harsha Sheena village is the Panjshir of Punjab. Long before Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated by two men posing as journalists two days before 9/11, a woman met Hardev Babbu just outside his home.
Babbu and his other comrades had been paying the terrorists back in the same coin – hitting them without waiting for them to attack. In many areas, the fundamentalists would block entry points leading to Hindu households, denying them access to essential commodities like milk and vegetables. But Babbu, a Sikh by birth, would lead his men to break such blockades. It was after a dreaded terrorist, Kuldeep Singh Tolanangal was killed by Babbu’s bullet, that the terrorists decided to annihilate him. But they could not fight back. So they hatched a plan. Posing as a journalist, the woman met Babbu and enticed him to come to Amritsar for an interview. It was there that Babbu was drugged and after being tortured brutally, his head was cut off and hung outside the gurudwara in his village to terrorise his friends. But instead of discouraging people from speaking out against terrorists, such killings motivated men like Tarsem Peter. Four years before Babbu’s barbaric killing, Comrade Baldev Mann was killed by terrorists in Harsha Sheena. “That day, I became a full-time opponent of oppression,” says Peter.
One night, while returning after addressing a public gathering, Peter was stopped by CRPF men. “I told them clearly that I had hidden a revolver under my motorcycle’s seat and that it was meant for self-defence. They let me go,” recalls Peter. Today Peter is the state president of a labour union.

In Lakhan ka Padda village, poet Jaimal Padda was shot dead on March 17, 1988. During the peak of terrorism, Padda would take out processions against Khalistan movement and write against terrorists in his journal. For his departed comrades, he had written a poem: Mitra di yaad nayo pulni (The memory of friends won’t fade away). Long after he is gone, Padda is still remembered by his friends. It is not important to raise statues in memory. Carrying forward his work is how he is being kept alive.

Years after the Khalistan movement withered away, dirty politics has begun once again. Sikh fundamentalist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale’s portrait has been installed at the SGPC museum in Amritsar. How do those who opposed the idea of Khalistan tooth and nail see it? “The whole politics of Punjab is based on such bogus issues; they are trying to divert peoples’ attention from problems like unemployment, etc.,” says writer Balbir Parwana. “Everything has been commodified,” says Peter. “Recently I saw 10-12 girls in a village bus. All of them wore air-hostess uniforms and wanted to make it big. But the problem is that the so-called university they go to operates from a single room,” he adds. “Some of us frequent a food-stall that sells fish fry. But this evening we couldn’t have it. A prominent politician from Punjab is staying at Radisson Hotel here and he has ordered the entire stock of fish for his chamchas and himself,” another Comrade tells us in Jalandhar.

As the night approaches, I am led to an ahaata (open-air bar) for a few rounds of vodka by some of the Comrades. After three rounds, one Comrade slurringly tells us: “You know, Yudhishtir’s (the eldest of Pandava brothers) chariot used to run two inches above ground since he only used to speak the truth. But after his role in Ashwathama’s death, his chariot hit the ground. If you really ask me, the chariots of today’s politicians have got stuck in the ground since they lie so much.”

Next morning, in Harsha Sheena, Hardev Babbu’s closest friend, Surjit Sheena is sitting outside the CPI-ML office. From the walls, the departed comrades stare back. “There have been some cases recently where postgraduate boys were involved in chain-snatching since there are no jobs,” he rues. I remain silent. After a pause, I ask him, “Do you still remember Comrade Babbu?” He looks at me, and then at Babbu’s picture. There is another pause and then he speaks: “Friends don’t die.”

(This essay first appeared in the year-end special of The Sunday Indian).

On the Kodak paper

Beneath the red quilt, your memories seep inside me like brandy. The days are shorter now and, in the night, when I am sometimes awakened, I feel my heartbeat – the feebleness of it. I have no more stories to tell; all plots are revealed. Some lie low, like dormant volcanoes. I suspect they will never ever erupt.

How do I weep silently again, like I did that night, years ago, when I came home, staggering on my feet, and listened to a song from Raincoat? The intensity of youth is fading away.

Yesterday, I was searching for old papers and it led me to an old, worn-out envelope. I recognised the stamp on it, probably stuck on it with your saliva. I opened it up with trembling hands. On the Kodak paper, your lips, glistening with Vaseline, sent those familiar invitations to me. In the luminosity of the pinewood burning in the fireplace, your face looked like Chinar leaves in autumn. In your hands you held a copy of Love in the times of cholera: hands that I have held in mine for God knows how many times. My fingers feel like dead branches; the lines on my palm are nothing but marks of your coming in and going out of my life.

Cook up a surprise for me. When I am lying down in a feverish blur, arrive silently and touch my parched lips. I will erase all lines from my palm. I will embalm my hands.

Come back, Maya.

For old time's sake

Theek hai - so be it
you said, promising to
buy me a pocket watch.
Opening its lid, I'll
watch seconds glide into
years; wait for Captain Time's
whistle, and then, I'll
caress your tresses

These days I play to
destiny's packed gallery,
watching it bend with laughter
at my antics. And in the solitude
of Begum Akhtar's voice
when your memory bedazzles my heart
like her nosepin, I cry silently

I remember you wore one too
years ago, when we met at
the house, close to the spot
where they had silenced Safdar Hashmi
I had thought that you'ld look like
your mother when you grow old

Please grow old with me
Don't travel alone in desolate
railway compartments, while
sun and shade roll dice after dice
I shall wait for Captain Time's whistle
and when I hear it, I'll sit beside you
and I'll caress your tresses

(In memory of Agha Shahid Ali)

One of those days

Sometimes, nothing matters in life. You wake up, stumble towards the balcony, pick up the bunch of newspapers, remove the rubber band which binds them together, read the headlines, look at the edit page, stare at Calvin and Hobbes, and throw the sheets away.

You don’t care about a smooth shave. It is a nippy end-October morning, and you wonder whether you should have a cold shower or switch on the geyser. Ultimately, you make do with a few mugfuls of cold water.

Books, which you collected for more than one decade, look like bricks. Sunflowers evoke no emotion. The crests and troughs of Abida Parveen’s voice irritate you. It is the same song on which you cried last night.

The statue of the unknown soldier, kept on your table, looks like an intruder. You don’t care whether your handkerchief is neat or not. You don’t bother to tie your shoelaces like butterfly wings, something your father taught you, twenty-five years back. You just do things.

In the evening you come back. You enter your room, closing the door behind you. You stare at the wall. It stares back at you. You pick up the mobile, searching for names you would like to talk to. There is no one. You switch it off.

A DVD of The Motorcycle Diaries is gathering dust. You close your eyes. You are not sleeping. You are not awake either. Someone calls your name outside. You don’t call back. You don’t get up.

Sometimes, nothing matters in life.

Hindi post

I have just written a piece in Hindi for a friend's blog. You can access it here.

Is the apple tree still there? (Part2)

Twenty-nine years ago there were very few houses there. And those had no boundary walls. The blossom-strewn patches of grass outside a house mingled freely with marigold flowerbeds outside another. In kitchen gardens, fenced with tree branches and thorny bushes, there grew tomatoes, chillies, brinjals, pumpkins, cucumbers, and on the small embankments, corncobs smiled gingerly from within their furry frocks.

The world was much simpler. An occasional thief would feel content by stealing an old, flickering bulb or a pair of worn-out slippers kept out on the verandah.

A few years before I was born, father had sold-off mother’s jewellery, emptied his provident fund, and got the house constructed at what was then a Srinagar suburb. My earliest memories of those days are to stare at green apples that hung like celestial bodies, amidst a cluster of leaves, on a tree in the front garden. The apples were of sour variety. My grandmother would pluck some of them, slice them with a small knife kept in her pheran pocket, and, after sprinkling salt over them, eat them with a girlish excitement.

During the day, when father and mother went off to work, it was my grandfather who took care of me. In the afternoon, we would sit under the shade of the tree; he would keep a pebble on my head, asking me to balance it. One of my favourite childhood stories was how the Earth was balanced on the horns of Lord Shiva’s carrier – the Nandi bull. And, grandpa told me, whenever Nandi shook his head, it would cause an earthquake on the Earth. When grandpa kept that pebble on my head, I imagined myself as Nandi, and shook my head vigorously.

“Totha, what if the Earth falls down from Nandi’s horns; then where will it go?”

“ In that case, it will crash into the Pataal lok – the nether world, where demons live.”

The Kashmiri Pandits believe in the power of Apezyeth – one moment in a 24-hour cycle, when whatever you say comes true. It was as if grandfather had said that bang on that moment. Ten years later, our world came crashing down.

It snowed heavily that January. Rahman, the milkman stopped coming. Men, wearing heavy LT jackets with stuffed pockets would cross our street. One by one, the neighbours locked their houses and went away. No one played cricket in the backyard.

That evening, the lights had gone off. Father heard someone laughing on the street below. Lifting a corner of the curtain, we looked down. A few boys were distributing houses among themselves. “You take Razdan’s house and I will take Kaul’s,” a boy called Imtiaz said. Then they all laughed. My father turned back. The next day we left.

Seventeen years, six months, and five days later, I am back. After Natipora’s cremation ground, where the ashes of my grandparents are scattered, I can’t recognise anything. The roads have become congested. The empty spaces I remember have all turned into concrete jungles. The streets are shabbier.

“This is where your house should be; the gurudwara is here,” Zubair points out. Yes, Zubair, it should be here. But where? I enter into the street.

A man, wearing a starched white shirt is standing at the gate. He is looking at us. “Whom are you looking for?” he finally asks. I remain silent. The pause is too deafening. Zubair explains. The man breaks into a smile, and extends his hand. As I shake it, he pulls me towards him, into a tight embrace.

‘My name is Gazanfar Ali; I am an advocate,” he says. “This is your land as much as it is mine. I am glad that you came.”

My house is right in front of his. We politely decline his offer of tea. I am madly clicking pictures. I want to show them to my ailing mother.

We enter the house. The blue gate is intact. So is the taur – the handle my father had specially got built. The new inhabitants have retained the name of the house. Aabshaar – the waterfall: the board outside the house still reads that. Zubair has to do a bit of explaining again. It is very uncomfortable. “Well… err… this is Rahul. Err… this house belonged… err…. They used to live here before.” The retired man understands. We are led inside.

I am sitting in my drawing room. All the show pieces in the glass almirah are gone. They have put crockery inside. There was a picture of my father receiving a state award for meritorious service from Sheikh Abdullah. It lay on the walnut-wood table. The photo is not there. The table must be in someone else’s house – displaying, perhaps, a replica of Taj Mahal. I am talking to the man. And I am clicking pictures.
“When we shifted, the house was in absolute mess. The walls were damp and the ceiling had come down at various places,” he says.

“We had been told that after we left, they had taken away sanitary fittings, leaving the water supply open,” I reply. There is silence. And then we both let out embarrassing smiles.

On my request, I am led upstairs, to what used to be my room. I had some books kept on a shelf: My experiments with truth, Freedom at midnight, Arabian nights, Tagore’s Geetanjali and the complete works of Swami Vivekananda. I look at the shelf. It has potatoes on it now. And some onions. One portion of the room has been converted into a sink; there is a tiled slab beside it. I look out from the window. There is no kitchen garden. A few yellow flowers have appeared on the pumpkin creeper of our times. It sways gently, as if welcoming me.

I finally say goodbye. On the verandah, the number of water works connection father had taken is still there: 44732. I am reminded of the apple tree. I turn towards it. A wall stares back at me.

“There used to be an apple tree here,” I ask.

“Oh, we got it cut; it was occupying too much of space.”

Ghulam Hasan Sofi’s voice rings in my ears:

B’e thavnus chaetit’h tabardaaran
Yaaro wan baalyaaro wan
Che’ kamyu karenay taveez pan?

(The woodcutter, he left me broken
Tell me my friend, tell me my beloved
Who has put you under a spell?)

Is the apple tree still there? (Part 1)

Suhail tells me of a boy who went with him to a boarding school, in a remote district of Kashmir. The boy, it seems, felt home sick, time and again, and would run away from school whenever he got a chance. After a few days, he would resurface, with absolutely no emotion on his face.

“What happened, why are you back so early?” his friends would ask him.

“Nothing,” he would reply. And then after a pause, he continued. “It may seem as if I was beaten up with brooms and a cricket bat, but that is not the case. Or it may seem that father kicked me and then rubbed nettle grass over my legs, but even that is not the case.” Then he would be silent. He would not speak for days.

I have felt home sick for seventeen long years, but like that boy, I never got a chance to run away. In my case, it was not the school, but exile from which I longed to escape.

It is a hot day in Srinagar, when I drive down on the roads in a Maruti 800. Beginning from the aerial view of the valley from the aircraft, as it prepared to land at the Srinagar airport, it feels like déjà vu. Tin roofs, vast fields of paddy, and the T.V. tower atop Shankracharya hill, standing like an old man, adjusting his spectacles, but still struggling to recognize a great grandson who has been away for too long – it only seems as If I have been here before.

From the Rambagh bridge, the car moves towards Lal Chowk. I see the first signpost of my home: Chanapora. How many times have I waited at this spot, in sky-blue shirt and grey trousers – my school uniform – clutching a one-rupee coin in my fist, to catch a bus back home!

On the Jahangir chowk, I spot the exhibition ground. Flashes of an incident, narrated to me by my mother, occur to me. A week after she was wedded to my father, the entire family went to watch a circus in the ground. While looking at the distant face of a performer, who stood at a height, ready to set himself on fire and then jump into the water below, my mother sensed that something was amiss. She told this to her mother-in-law but she wouldn’t pay heed. In a few minutes all hell broke loose. The performer got nervous and just would not jump. The crowd got restless. There was a stampede. My mother led every family member to a nearby shop, whose rear wall was broken, and then, they got away to safely.

The Assembly building on the banks of Jhelum is like a pale moon. The black soot of a fire that broke decades ago is still there. Nothing has changed. On the other end is the Hanuman temple. During Operation Blue Star, some miscreants had held the God responsible for the military action, and thrown his idol in the muddy river water. But as children, we were only interested in sweetmeats of Tuesday and watching sadhus with matted hair, sitting cross-legged, taking deep puffs from a common chillum.

The Palladium cinema looks like a postcard from Gaza strip. The Sun Chasers shop is still there. And so is the Jan bakery, the makers of the best pineapple pastry in the world. Tibetans (or are they Ladakhis?) still sell thick woolen sweaters on the pavement outside the Tyndale Biscoe School. The Clocktower in the central market square boasts of a digital clock now. But it still doesn’t show accurate time.

The Boulevard road is the same. Paper machie boxes are still on display in shops at the Dal Gate, as they used to be when I was at home. Dr. Naseer still practices there. 26 years ago, he had told my father that he has a small puncture somewhere in his intestines. Almost three decades later in Delhi, the doctors confirm it, but are unable to detect its exact location. Dr. Ali Jan has passed away. The road on which his clinic existed has been named after him.

The Dal Lake has shrunk but the houseboats still have names like Buckingham Palace and Cleopatra. The car takes a fast turn near the Chashme Shahi, but I guess I have seen the shop where I had the first (or perhaps, second) ice-cream cone of my life. Last time, I had come here with Ravi, on his sparkling red motorcycle. Ten years later after we made that trip, he was dragged out of a bus and shot dead by militants.

Another ten years have passed since then. But not much has changed in Kashmir. The last thing that needs to be checked is our erstwhile house at Chanapora. Have the new occupants of the house changed its structure? Is the apple tree - the keeper of my childhood secrets - still there in our small lawn?

I swear, the thought feels like nettle grass.

(To be continued...)

Dal lake, Kashmir

So many stories to tell, from Kashmir. Watch this space.

The boy on the highway

I shot this picture in January 2006, on the Barmer-Jodhpur highway, in Rajasthan. This boy came to us out of curiosity, and performed Gymnastics to impress us. While sifting through old pictures, I saw this one, and immediately uploaded it on this blog. Now, the question is: are you impressed?

The old man and the rum

Many years ago, an old man took the above path, one moonless night, in Lansdowne. He was going home, after visiting a friend’s place. It was quite late in the night, and the man had had a bit too much to drink. After all, his friend, who happened to be an ex-serviceman in the Army, had become a grandfather, recently, and it was, indeed, a special occasion for him. And in the hills, if you refuse a drink in a soldier’s house, you immediately run into the risk of being dubbed as a ‘traitor.’

Now this man kept on walking, while keeping a watch, from the corners of his eyes, at any leopard who could have been on prowl that night. But more than the animal, it was the fear of a ghost that created butterflies in his stomach. Not very far from where he walked, unsteadily due to the spirits, which he had consumed a little while ago, a young British Lieutenant had been pushed over from a cliff by his fellow officers after a drunken brawl. Though the incident was said to have happened almost fifty years ago, it was rumoured – and such rumours are taken quite seriously in the hills – that during nights, particularly on moonless nights, the officer could be seen walking with a short cane stick in his hand; the one which he took along on evening walks along the cemetery road.

It was at a bend on this road that the old man’s worst fear came true. Blocking the road in front of him, he saw this fair young man in tattered uniform, of the Royal Garhwal Rifles. He was laughing – laughing, the man recalled later, as ghosts were supposed to. The man had worked with the English, during the last days of the Raj, and he knew a little bit of their language. “Excuse me, Sir,” he addressed the officer, who, the old man noticed, was carrying a cane stick under his armpit. “I am a poor man, and I have just consumed alcohol that is worth a week of my pension. It would be unkind on your part to make my feeling of intoxication vanish in thin air. So, would you be kind enough to spare me?” The officer stopped laughing but still would not leave the road. The old man noticed that the officer’s gaze was fixed at his bulging pocket. Ah, then he remembered. He took out the bottle of military rum from his pocket and offered it to the officer. The officer disappeared after clicking his heels, and saluting the old man. From there, till the safety of quilt in his room, the old man just ran, without looking back, or offering a sideway glance.

Today, the old man is no more. He is probably sharing a drink with the officer, up there. It is midnight, as I come out of Colonel Rawat’s house, after proving my ‘patriotism’ by gulping down extra-large pegs of whiskey. As I shake hands, no body notices the bulge in my pocket. In case I meet the officer on his evening walk, I don’t want to be caught off-guard. Moreover, who would mind a salute from a British officer?

Lansdowne, this time

Sometimes, you have to revisit a place in order to understand it; to find new meanings. It is somewhat like putting your hands in an old pair of worn-out trousers, and discovering crisp currency notes inside a pocket. That is what Lansdowne felt like to me this time.

Deep inside the pathway leading to Dhura, I found the ruins of what used to be the mansion of a lone English Forest Ranger. Only a few walls is what is left of it now, almost hidden by pine needles.

I imagine the officer, collecting hot water in his stone basin, to shave off his stubble with a razor. Then I visualise him penning down a letter, addressed to himself, just for the heck of having the pleasure of tearing open a letter with a silver cutter.

I imagine writing about Dhura in the introductory passage of my novel. I can see my friends trying to track me down around this path, as I sit, overlooking a valley, with a notebook open over my lap; my back resting against stones so round that it would seem that the Gods had played a game of Pithoo Garam (Seven Stones) there.

One day, I will shift here. And write.

Love is an old shirt

It's a Sunday today. I think, if I visit the coffee house in the evening, I may be able to spot you. "He wonders, why do I insist on going to the coffee house. How do I tell him why." This is what your sms read. "Who do you love more?"I committed this stupid mistake of asking you again. Now I realise how your love has made me capable of jealousy. You wrote back, the screen of my mobile phone getting lit like a thunder sky. "I have only loved once. I cannot fall in love again." Ah. I remember closing my eyes, and leaning backwards, in relief perhaps. But the fact is that you are not with me.

Sometimes, when there is no one around, I open my cupboard, and take out that old, worn-out shirt. You had washed it once, with your hands. More than the detergent, it smells of the moisturiser you'ld put on your hands.

I would like to think that you use the washing machine now.

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…