Days

It feels a little strange to come back to work after the break. There's some familiarity,  there's some disorientation - much like if you traveled halfway across the world and didn't know about the time difference.  So you'd leave home at midnight and reach that other place at midnight as well. I think that's the one big lesson traveling teaches you...that even if you lose your bearings, you still reach somewhere. Sometimes, even the place you had set out to reach.

As for me, days at work will take some getting used to. Like today. Rush for a deadline, snatches of a tslk wigh a friend,  bad coffee, some inchoate feeling of being let down, and a sated feeling that today, I did some part of my job well.

I like work, though. Allows me my personal battle and my private truce.

Upon watching 'Wicked'

Watched the musical 'Wicked'. Had gone brainwashed with sky-high expectations and spectacular reviews. Wicked matched every expectation, except for those that it surpassed. When Elphaba soars up the stage with her transformation complete as the Wicked Witch of the West...there was magic then. When Glinda comments frothily about the Emerald Island: "It's so Ozmopolitan", there was magic there. The choreography, the music, the message of that musical...it was all magic, magic, magic! There's this proximity to brilliance within touching distance that a stage show brings that a movie - with all its 3-D effects and whatever else - will never compare with. When you watch something great on stage, you know that it hasn't been 'managed' or 'edited' or 'crafted'. You know that it has been brought forth that moment only for you. As an audience of a good film, I feel happy. As an audience of a good stage show, though, I feel privileged. As for Wicked...it was most certainly an honour.

That little pool of light shows so much of the way

It's past midnight in Chicago. My friend is sitting and reading a book. Two sets of red and cream candles are set on a tray lined with pebbles. They are unlit and their wicks are white and clean, not yet singed by fire. Beyond the large French windows, there's a lawn. On it and around it, you see nocturnal outlines of trees, other houses, shrubs, and sweet little ghosts set up as Halloween ornamentation. Often, I walk down these lanes in the morning. That's when I see trees resplendent in stiff orange and burgundy leaves. Lush lawns sweeping across suburbia and clouds of molten leaves swirling to ponds and floating away. Wild geese fly high in 'V' formations - strident and strong and heading home. It's night time now and I don't see any of that tonight. Tomorrow, it will be day and I will see them again.

Tonight, I think of Diwali somewhat like this - not so much about good over evil...but like a gentle reconnect with the feeling that it's all there. Close by.

So, quickly, what all is going on

I have taken to Twitter in a big way. I love the itsy-bitsiness of stories there. Sometimes, an incident occurs and you just want to shave it and let the moments curl off and fall...instead of writing about the whole block of the experience.  At times, it feels like cooking cheese. Easier to do it when you grate it instead of melting the whole hunk of it.

I'm elfrain on Twitter,  in case, anyone wants to say hi.

Also, I'm taking a month off work to go to Chicago. Will be spending some time with my friend.  He will be working during the week so I'll be spending time by myself most days. So, if anyone wants to catch up in Chicago, let me know. I fly tomorrow night.

That's it for now. More later.

Heaven was us

You hold me, You set me free
You mould me, You let me be,
Our stars are muddy
With our footprints now
And there's dust lodged under our moon-nails.

Gets gritty soon, gets sweaty quick,
Yet we claw strong through our kingdom
Losing inch by painful inch
With your holding and my freedom.





 

Lunch Box, really?

Scene 1: Make tiffin.
Scene 2: Pack tiffin.
Scene 3: Unpack tiffin.
Scene 4: Eat tiffin.
Scene 5: Make tiffin.
Scene 6: Pack tiffin.
Scene 7: Unpack tiffin.
Scene 8: Eat tiffin.
Scene 9: Oh, Bombay is so crowded.
Scene 10: And I am so lonely.
Scene 11: Besides, look how trapped I feel.
Scene 12 to n: Make, pack, unpack, eat tiffin.

And that gang is SURPRISED that the movie wasn't nominated for the Oscars?

Seemed right tonight

For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

- from W.H. Auden's September 1, 1939

The Juhi and Kalki video

I like that video of Kalki and Juhi. Satire or not, it has come to aggregate every notion about assault in today's times. There's a scene in Mona Lisa Smile where Julia Roberts takes her class through a portfolio of advertisements created during that time. Sweet, proper women making soup, getting made up, keeping house, patting children, and staying silent, etc. In exasperation, she flings down this material and says something to the effect that these ads reflect exactly the kind of choices we made during a certain period. An entire generation will be remembered for exactly the things that these pictures capture.

Many years down the line, maybe our resistance to assault will get meshed with some collective shriek of years gone by. Maybe the insidious horror of rape, real and imminent, will not register because there may be so much of it or maybe we will be deadened. And maybe for those times, I think this video will be useful. To give, tongue in cheek, our message to the other gender: "We thought better of you. Our mistake. Sorry about that."

The absolute deliciousness in staying alone...

...is to pad along the cool, tiled expanse of the home, brewing lemon tea in the dead of the night, even as moonlight and starlight wilt. It's taking that warm, comforting beverage, sitting on an armchair, that's not your usual armchair but feels just so right. It's picking up a long-forgotten, hardbound book of poems, read through the lines and then read them again, slowly sipping the lines the way one does the tea...and feel warm, comforted, and exalted by it all.

 

If the Gods were one of us...

 

 

 

This is the ganpati murti in my help's, Nanda's, home. It's a shed deep in the fields that is, today, swampy and marshy, due to incessant rain. The shed has been swept and decorated with fushcia and green rangoli. As a backdrop, she has used a lovely saffron-golden net saree. People in whose houses she works have given the tinsel and streamers. The incense sticks are special mogra-scented ones from her village.

 

When the winds howled and threatened to rip the roof apart and disarray everything, she and her family leapt to hold on to the tin sheets, while shielding the murti like a baby from the storm. I wonder if people ever realize how strong they are when they go to such lengths to protect a god, no less. I wonder if the god realizes how lucky it is that such fine, strong people treat it like one of their own.



A moment, a moment

...to record this absolutely precious night. Changed into a freshly laundered pair of white kurta pajama, a combination that I have probably not worn since I was a child. Opened the fridge to find gifts from my father - 4 custard apples. I take one, break open its crusted skin, and dig into the cool, sticky flesh. I peel the thick bits off the seed or suck the sweet meatiness off them. It's sweet, cool, and exquisite. And through my mouth and into my heart, there's a great explosion of gratitude!

Bliss.

Coming home now?

Sudden, small things help. Like after a night of wading through dense marsh of inchoate bullying of the day, to spot early sunlight spool in through the window. To stand on the divider of the road and catch your breath when you notice the sky – unblemished, blue and glassy, with splays of plush clouds leaving silken trails. Open, honest, true – like the heart you once had. And like the returning of that heart.

Says something?

That I have fever and I am also in love. :-)

Maybe it is like this?

That with skies and puddles, red earth, crumpled napkins, careless hellos, unfinished breakfasts, there isn't too much to a day other than a giant, phantasmagorical Rorscharch test. The late nights is when I'm staring hard at the smudge that the day arranged for me. I assign a meaning and then I sleep. To do the very same thing the next day. Maybe, in summation, at the end of my life, I will see those hard thought meanings speckle the expanse of the wings of the Rorscharch butterfly that will fly away.

Who would've thought? Certainly not me...

That it's a precious gift when friends can't join you in your outings. I had such a beautiful walk, savouring the way 7 o'clock shadows painted the world in broad strokes. I still have it seeped inside me somewhere - the magazine articles I lingered over with a warm beverage.

That I would love my Kindle application which now has Eat, Pray, Love and Anais Nin on it, including, what I hope will be the story of my life, a memoir of a man eho apprenticed with the Himalayan Masters. That I can dip into a page whenever I want, so easily.Sometimes, it's to re-read a phrase, think of a paragraph again, ir just melt in the mood of a story. Forget about all the naysayers who pooh-pooh online reading. It's scrumptious.

Blissful. I feel blissful.