On the job

One normal workday at a focus group

an ear suddenly gives up on the job.

The work goes on – the bistro, wine and soup

discussed threadbare. Just one out of the loop.

In time that ear’s cajoled back. Then some blob

blocks out breath and smell with a growth that throbs.

Growth in the wrong directions. Breathless, stooped.

Some sense is lost once airways or sounds stop.

A blade intervenes and lets in some air.

But now it’s a different one that is cracked –

while the eye’s gone about its work unaware,

it’s also dimmed its own light down. Cataract!

All senses will fail. The warnings are there -

split open in focus groups with trivial facts.

Grey city

The skyline doesn’t change much, but underneath
a few doors close, keys turn firmly in their locks.
Never again the same those routes, entire cities -
as hearts and hearths both seep out from crumbling blocks.


Every year monsoons pour down and new vines reach
for a bolder grip, the banyan saplings stalk
the cracks between mortar and bricks, something’s breached
that can’t be made whole again with skill or talk.


The days and nights turn just like keys in keyholes
and they shut me out. Pulverise the bedrock
in rude light, trap me in tangled wires and poles
in broadened ruins of lanes and their aftershocks.


Each visit fewer paths and doors to call on,
no stones to turn, more bridges burnt. More alone.

This one was sparked off by a close aunt, who asked sometime ago - has Kolkata become a city for the aged? 

It hit home harder while I was there last month. A younger cousin was planning a move after almost a decade there. A good few houses in my circle are now locked up or sold off, because the senior generation is no more, and the younger ones have made their lives elsewhere. Each time I go back, there are progressively fewer people to call on, fewer roads to travel.

Kolkata has been greying for a long time now, deindustrialisation has meant jobs drying up. The city was once reputed for its premier institutes of education, but they got riddled with political interference way back and never recovered, with the result that many students today pursue post-16 studies in other parts of the country. All in all, young people are leaving in droves; the elderly are increasingly alone and isolated. Not exactly a brilliant recipe for happiness. 

Rolling

What's the point of an angled stone
that will not learn to roll?
A certain restlessness is the
secret to a tranquil soul.
To gain a patch of moss is not
the only thing worthwhile.
To have stood naked, free and proud
after a thousand miles,
stripped of extraneous, angle, edge,
in its own orbit content
was far more than a bed of green
or springy could have meant.





Aaaand I've rolled right back. On a break from the break. Here for a few days before I take off again, this time westwards. Hope everything is going brilliantly with you all. Stay dazzling and tranquil. Like sunlight on water.

A dream of one's own

She has no space for any luxury -

two rooms, a teabag-size single income,

darned heels and elbows, and the drudgery

that’s supposed to be happiness on crumbs.

Her dreams are supersized, though the teabags

are squeezed once, twice, even three times at a pinch;

too many mouths to carry on one back,

too few hands and too many beds per inch.

But she has a heart resistant to despair -

she dreams of a sleek console; a doll’s house

with one bed per bedroom, a store and stairs,

a library of tiny books to browse.

She hoards each scrap of waste fabric and wood,

to get her child what she’s missed in childhood.

Write...Edit...Publish...June 2018 : Unravelled Yarn

Image credit
Baluchari sari anchal - traditional handloom silk from Bengal.

Hello WEPers, and welcome to the June Challenge - Unravelled Yarns. Today I have a flash set in 80's Bengal, which is my home state in the eastern part of India, historically and also currently an important handloom centre. Undivided Bengal was where the famous muslin, so prized from Ancient Rome to 19th century Europe, was made. For millennia, Bengal produced a range of exquisite handloom textiles which were prized the world over. The setting therefore was a foregone conclusion! :) 

Many of these weaves were lost between the 19th and 20th centuries because of various reasons. However, revival and recovery efforts after independence has meant a steady restoration of skills and a comeback for these unravelled, and unrivalled, yarns.

The Motif

The road leading into the village washes out every monsoon for miles, but thankfully it is a few weeks before the rains hit and there is still a thin film of tarmac left. And it has been a miracle of connections, the call coming through that morning, the landlady remembering to mention it promptly, the trains and the buses and all the tedious details of travel aligning. Above all, my cluelessness for once taking a holiday and letting me decipher the message for what it was. Please tell him we could do with his help. Grandfather misses him. He must be very sick indeed, he has never let it be said out loud that he misses me ever before.

Even as I rattle the knocker, there seems to be something odd about the atmosphere. I cannot quite place it for a moment. Then Moilu opens the door and I am in the tiny courtyard. I realise what it is – the quality of silence. Already heavy with some nameless foreboding, the reassuring ker-thunk ker-thunk of the looms is missing among the medley of birdsongs and the phut-phut-phut of an autorickshaw on the main road two lanes away. The difference is an aural shock – I have never heard the looms silent during the day before. Even Moilu’s face is quiet, too quiet for a child.

The faded dark green curtain has not changed, the doorsill is the same uneven slash of concrete separating the raised veranda from his room. I lift the fabric and go in. The curtain filters the half-light to a green darkness. He is on his string bed, I realise I have never seen him lying down during daylight hours either.

“I touch your feet, Grandfather.”

He opens his eyes, when did they get so tired? His eyelids look like wrinkled bedsheets around a dark glass marble, his cheekbones sharp as a bamboo holding up the middle of a crumpled marquee.

“Ah, you came? I’m glad. I’ve things to tell you -”

I reach for his hands, they feel cold and dry, the fingertips roughened by the wood and the yarns and the years of working the Baluchari patterns, making the perfectly oblong storyboards meet without gaps or mitres at the silken corners of the anchal.

He has been doing this since childhood, his childhood, not mine. Baluchari is the family livelihood, and I have been initiated into it early too…but he sent me away enthusiastically a couple of years back. “Oh, it will be good for you. And us. Fresh design ideas. Traditions can be kept alive only through the new,” his hands all the while moving briskly on the loom, the copper colour yarn and the navy blue slowly forming into the pattern, spelling out the story of Rai-Kanai. Ker-thunk. Ker-thunk.

“Rest and get well, Grandfather.”

“No time, I’ve an idea…you'll put it down for me…Moilu doesn’t have your gift...You’ll do it, won’t you?”

“Yes, of course.”

But there is no response from the bed. The eyes have closed back again.

***

Outside, my mother is hovering with a glass.

“It’s not long,” she whispers and her face too is like the silent looms. “I’m glad you came. He’s been asking for you ever since...come and eat something.”

After the meal I go back to him and he opens his eyes, all of a sudden remarkably lucid, takes up the conversation as if there has been no break.

“You know Moilu goes to this school run by the Khristhans? They too have this story of the Flood, a great big Fish and the Tree of Life in a perfect Garden…there too they tell stories of Prophets on high mountains.”

“Really, Grandfather?”

“Yes, they’d make great motifs...Come closer.”

And so I sit next to him with the paper and colour in a beautiful woman with long hair holding out a fruit to a man in a resplendent garden with apple trees. And a snake. He insists on the snake. Who wants to wear a sari with a snake?

As it is young women nowadays do not always wear traditional Bengali saris, there is a lot of choice now – lehengas, shararas, anarkalis and even memsahebi gowns. His grip on reality is tenuous. Our traditions themselves are unravelling. I see it every day at the studio where I work. But I do not argue with Grandfather. There is no arguing with him.

“Ivory on green.” He murmurs when it is finished to his satisfaction. “Only the fruits picked out in deep red.”

Those, as it happens, are his last words.

***

Nothing I’ve told you so far is true. This is how I wish it had happened.

My landlady forgot to mention the call till the next morning. It was monsoons so the telephone back at the village wasn’t working, cables were knee deep in water. I managed to get through only after a couple of days and started off a good week later, there were no tickets to be had, no stars aligned for me. It was all too late. The cremation was over when I reached.

Afterwards Moilu told me about her principal, a nun from the school attached to the orphanage, visiting grandfather to persuade him about Moilu continuing high school.  The visit sparked him off - he talked excitedly of a new motif based on the Khristhani stories. But he fell ill almost immediately.

I did work his idea into a motif. But without the snake, I couldn’t for the life of me get the snake done right, it just looked like a zigzag thread, like a horrible mistake. So in the end I just did the man and woman and the garden with apple trees. I wove one with ivory on pistachio green, the fruits in red.  It sold well. I wove one with green on deep red too, gorgeously bridal. But that was years later. I wove it for Moilu and she wore it at her wedding.

WC - 994

FCA

Read the other entries here: 

A few words about the context. Not essential to read this to follow the story, but might be nice to know.

Touching the feet of elders is a traditional Indian greeting and mark of respect.

Anchal, also known as Pallu/Pallav, is the free end of the sari draped over the shoulder. The handloom sari has an unbroken history of 3000+ years in India.

Khristhan - Christian

Lehenga, sharara, anarkali - traditional stitched attires from other parts of India, usually two pieces - a tunic and some kind of trousers, worn by women with a long scarf-like fabric draped over the torso.

Memsahebi - memsaheb refers to a woman of European/foreign origin.

Baluchari is a heritage handloom silk weave from Bengal, originally from a village called Baluchar (meaning sandbank), now woven in villages in the Bishnupur/Bankura district. These are characterised by a heavily worked anchal, and have human/animal narrative motifs from the Hindu epics in the borders, they often had motifs based on life/figures from the royal courts also, the people who patronised the craft. Essentially a story in a sari. These motifs meet seamlessly without disruption at the corners of the central space in the anchal symmetrically. In the past, the weavers/artists would achieve that from memory, there was no template, no documentation, each generation passing on the art to their descendants/disciples. But these skills were lost at the beginning of the 20^th century. The Baluchari was revived in the 1950’s when the jacquard looms replaced the traditional old style jala looms. Nowadays there is an attempt to revive the art of the jala looms also. Read more about the Baluchari sari here.

Most Indian brides would traditionally wear red. Red is an auspicious colour in Hinduism, it signifies shakti - the feminine energy principle of the universe. But this is not confined to Hindus, it is a cultural practice, Muslim, Jain and Sikh brides also traditionally wear red in the subcontinent. Most Christian brides get married in white, but some might choose to wear colours from the red/fuchsia/peach spectrum also. 

Shoulder blade

Tenderness is a parasol

in my father’s hand,

it’s the water he offers me

at the school bus stand;

it’s the large, white handkerchief

with which he wipes my face,

it’s the way he brushes my hair,

ties up a loose shoelace.

Tenderness is a shoulder blade

that takes my bag off me

and carries my books and all my loads

for all eternity.

Eid Mubarak and Happy Father's Day to all those who are celebrating! 

The carrom men

Credit

Like the discs of carrom, we friends too, are

gathered in a circle here, every day;

at the first strike we too are scattered far,

and some fall, while some remain to play.

Sometimes the game is close and passions swift,

and the player might miss a couple of men,

the queen plays hard to get, or drops a gift,

but the one who wins her loses her again.

It’s all shatter and change at every strike

in carrom as in life, it’s just the same

you’ve got to play it, like it or dislike,

you take the board you get in either game.

A few days back, I saw an image of four men playing carrom, not this image, a different one - one to which I have no rights and can't digitally sneak in here :) But being rubbish at digital sneaking does not stop me from drawing word-images in my head. Incidentally, the discs are technically called 'carrom men' - which is what sparked off the whole thing. 

Carrom always reminds me of long afternoons and evenings with my mum, playing various board and card games. By the time this posts, I'll hopefully be on my way to her, but there won't be any carrom played when I get there. No games left in that house. But the parental home is always the parental home, carromful or carromless...right? 

Because I'll be travelling off and on next few weeks, it might take me a bit of time to scramble back online, but I'll get here whenever I can. 

Meanwhile, stay well and keep your game on and lively! :) 

Empty Nester Countdown

There’ll be no live music, no broken strings.

Every light switched off at bedtime, nothing

left on, no nightly raids, no sudden noise,

no extra-late breakfast weekend mornings.

No sprawl of papers and text books, no trails

of missing laces, no urgent emails

on deadlines and sudden requests to pick up,

no fridge surface cluttered with school details.

How clean will the rooms get?! how organised

the cushions on the sofa, harmonised

dining chairs singing as a perfect choir

flush against the table, neat, civilised.

But a bit more lifeless this life, more sterile

without your hands around it, without your smile.

I have been immersed in post-18 pathway possibilities lately. Less than one year to go before I become mum-of-grown-up-child, yay! n yikes! And a sliver more than a year before the fledgling flies...

In more uniformly cheery news, the sign ups at Write...Edit...Publish... are now open for the June Challenge. Sign up now and post on 20th on Unravelled Yarns...Click the link for details. 

Hometowns and homes

It’s ages since I’ve been to that teashop

and I haven’t gone back down that straight lane

where cobblers used to sit by the bus stop

though I’ve thought often I must go back again,

see myself if the lamppost with the dent

is the same still? wires sagging drunkenly;

if the same old cracks split up the pavement

made wider perhaps by that jamun tree.

We played barefoot, we rarely had shoes on

and had no business with the shoeshine guy.

I wonder if new hopscotch lines get drawn

and if the shop still serves our spiced up chai?

But what if the jamun has been cut down? -

tough that homes don’t always stay in hometowns.

Ordinary trips

I.

All my journeys, even the quick trips

to top up the fridge, to the corner store

were pilgrimages – I just didn’t know it –

sacred without the fuss of unstitched cloth.

Sacred without strong curling incense smoke

without the sound of bells, and sandal paste,

everyday sacred – a flea bitten dog

by the roadside rooting in the vats

raising his head at my scent, to sniff

and drop it back again in the trash,

a sudden war-conch blare in the traffic

inching forward to meet the peak hour rush.

All of them were pilgrimages – each one

on hallowed ground without any milestone.

II.

Each step peels away in moments, yet builds

a spine and shrinks it too, it is deepened

even as it is deeply scooped and stripped.

I walk home with rice and a frozen chicken.

Is the body a cell? It never felt

a prison, the room never like a shrine,

the sacred always outside in a world

of rotting mango peels, feet crumbed with grime

washing at the gobbets of old tube wells.

My heels are cracked with winter, lashes spiked

with discharge, but they can bear witness still

to the small miracles of runway lights

guiding the plane back on land. Every trip

a sacredness – I just didn’t know it.

III.

Yet it knows, deep within its chemical paths

the body knows and responds to sacred -

that’s why it stands barefoot on the earth

turns to the red glow beyond its shut eyelids,

and opens them for dogs on garbage heaps,

thinks the doorsill is its point of conflict. –

There's a degree of sacred in concrete,

if the earth's paved over, nothing's diminished.

And that’s why it walks to the corner store,

onto the four point crossing, and the bus stop

and beyond that, and beyond! goes where it goes

in blind tribute, yanked by its own make up.

That’s why it leaves, the fridge’s just a pretext,

and why it comes back and plans where to go next.

In my apron

Poppy field by van Gogh, 1890. Image credit

I will not let this snow cover

of violence deaden my world

into breathless radio silence.

I will not let sandpaper words,

the hard, wind-tossed hearts of vandals,

swamp out the daisies and poppies

when and where it’s spring. I’ll let drifts

of leaves fall wherever they want,

weave against this doorsill in autumn.

I’ll pluck huge bouquets of hope,

keep them massed in my apron

like secret talismans. From the red

wildfires of poppies I’ll pick them,

and from the red, dead leaf banks.

I’ll walk miles of cheerful wildflowers

and the sky’ll sew its own linings

overhead in gold and silvershine.

And the sharp-spiralled razor wires

won’t stop a single leaf. Or stop me

from holding the flaming bunches

in the crook of my torn elbows.

***

In praise of some violence

A-Z reflections: At the end of something or other - n still Zetetic, though Zonked...

For some vague reason this song has been bzzzzzing in my head…so I might as well share it here.  

As with the other years, intrepid stranger or close friend, you pays no money, but you gets your choice - take your pick -