How to miss a city

 

The big landmarks? - those multilevel flyovers/bridges, the breadth of the corniche, the river itself, the Tower and the most historic manmade structures towering over everything? But those are not the things I miss the most. It’s the smaller stuff, the unremarkable, the everyday things that change irrevocably once one moves. That’s what I miss. Inexplicably. Sometimes intensely.  

 

Like the sounds of Arabic on the streets, the loops and dots and diacritics of the script on the signages. Cities are not id-ied by their random street corner conversations, their vendor calls or what the waiters/cabbies/parking attendants speak, but they should be. It determines what life there is pegged to, its all-important background score. Whether one understands or not doesn’t signify, the cadence of the language primes and changes one, slowly draws one in to its mystique. It has always felt to me that their words are pronounced from somewhere deeper inside the chest, somewhere much closer to the heart.

 

The tamr hind juice seller in the alleyways of the ancient market, with his shiny metal cymbals and fez. A guy on a bicycle balancing a large wooden pallet of bread on his head, early one winter morning, his breath misting in the cold. That’s another thing – properly cold winters, not these sham, jumped up seasons of 25s and 22s masquerading as cold.

 

The unevenness of the cobblestones in the Yellow Alley under my feet in the early February morning. The centuries old rivets on the massive wooden Gate of Conquest. The ‘marching soldiers’ crenellation of the boundary wall around an ancient monument. The stained glass in an 18^th century merchant residence. The view through a mashrabiya, a minutely latticed window made of turned bits of teeny tiny wood fitted into each other like a complicated puzzle. The sunlight slanting in through the oblong openings of the roof cover of  the tentmakers’ street.

 

Young schoolchildren playing football at 2 a.m. in the morning at the meidan in Kafr Nassar as I return home from a late night dinner. The huge banyan in Zamalek and those jacarandas, laden with mauve blossoms in season so that not much green is visible. Ditto the rows of flamboyants in 6^th Oct.

 

The melodious voice of the neighbourhood muezzin and his azaan slicing the day into five neat segments. Four actually, because I was asleep most times when he gave the first call. The shape of the arches in the oldest mosque, the wide sweep of the desert just beyond the range of the balcony, the curve of the wrought iron railings in Downtown, the arrow-straight grace of the minarets piercing the sunset from Ahzar Park. 

The triple height loaded pickup trucks on Ring Road reminding me of Rajasthani ladies with three tiered water pots. A car blithely reversing into the Juhayna roundabout at top speed. A silent old man with rheumy eyes offering household wares for sale by the roadside after the revolution dried up the tourist trade. A young boy in a torn singlet flying a green kite during Shem el Nessim.

 

The angle of the light as it hit an old glass lantern in the old city. The angle of the light as it hit the floor in Emerald, where some earlier resident had stubbed out a cigarette and left a burn mark on the wooden veneer. The bookshops displaying Naguib Mahfouz titles in two different languages, where suddenly finding a book by Amitabh Ghosh had made my heart race. The seafood chowder at Chef called Viagra soup for some reason I  never did find out during so many dinners there.

 

Just some of the things from a city that was home once but isn’t anymore, yet still feels as though it is and that it should be.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Because I was comparing Fiji with 70's Nigeria, and that led to a long thread on what we, the ex-Naijja expat children, miss about that life. That naturally had to bring to mind the other city in Africa I've lived in, for longer than I've lived in Bauchi and Maiduguri individually. 

i carry your heart with me (i carry it 

in my heart) i am never without it..... ~ e e cummings

Molina's Key

Would you believe me if I told you that it took decades for us, my cousin and I, to compare notes and figure out the whole thing? She had passed away by then. Our aunt, I mean - Matulu we called her, all the siblings and cousins of our generation. I was well into my teenage when I saw her open a bottle of Coke and the penny dropped finally. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to wonder at Molina’s choice of the Keeper of the Key.

The key to Molina’s room was kept on top of Matulu's Allwyn refrigerator. It was  huge, easily three times the size of the normal keys we saw tucked in at the waists, beyond the saree pleats of our mothers or tied into a knot at the anchal of our grandmother. Ornately fashioned from inlaid brass, with a vine and flower design climbing up the shaft, the key was impressive, and scary.

Matulu was an easygoing, affectionate maternal figure. Nearly a grandmotherly one in my case, as she was older than my own mother by almost twenty years. I spent a lot of time in her home. But I can’t remember her ever in any disciplining mode – she was always smiling. Always ready to make me my favourite dishes of Mohanbhog, Malpoa and fried potato matchsticks on demand.  And she fed them to me personally with endless tales of Teacher Fox and his Students, the Crocodile Hatchlings. The disciplinarian was Molina. Quite the opposite of Matulu, in fact.

Molina lived within the precincts of the lake on the opposite side of the road from my aunt. None of us had ever actually seen Molina up close, but we knew her well enough. Not particularly endearing, she was old and walked with a limp, in the spotless white of a Bengali widow. She had bloodshot eyes from staying up nights. Molina knew every child in the neighbourhood, even the ones who were only visitors, their comings and goings, their intentions good and bad, their deepest, darkest secrets. She took the too boisterous, the disobedient, the misbehaved ones away to the small room atop the water tower that stood beside the lake, rising many stories  above the surrounding low-rise homes.

“Into that room high up, up, up she takes them, locks the door with this key and teaches them a lesson,” Matulu said. She took the key from the top of the fridge and let me feel its weight in my small, four year old palm.

“Will she take me too, Matulu?” I asked, the key twinkling in my hand, heavy and ominous.

“Oh no, never,” came the instant reply. ”You’re a good girl, aren’t you? You’re my golden girl, you’re the best behaved. Molina only takes the naughty ones to that room.” Matulu took the key from my fingers and put it back on the fridge again. She bent down and hugged me close. “You’re ever so lokkhi. Molina would never even look at you.”

I immediately resolved to grit my teeth and be as well behaved, as lokkhi as was humanly possible. If the key to the room was this big and scary, what would the lessons conducted therein be like?

Sometime past sixteen, I saw Matulu open a Coke bottle with Molina’s key and realised that hallowed and feared object’s real purpose. The key, or the bottle-opener, still lived on the Allwyn fridge.  Why Molina, even if she did exist, would choose to keep her key on Matulu's fridge never occurred to me once in all those years of childhood.

Just a few months ago, one of my cousins and I got reminiscing together and an avalanche of a-ha moments later, figured that Molina was a common motif Matulu used to keep all her nephews and nieces in line. An imaginary, invisible disciplinarian but so very effective. We laughed, and then fell silent. Matulu was not around to see our epiphany, she has been gone more than a decade now. But she would have enjoyed it, she always did like a good laugh. 

Only carrots, very little stick. A neat trick, and gentle. Molina’s key. Kind of sums up the zeitgeist of our entire collective childhood.

~~~

So that's it folks, 2019 is done, the last post is written and here is a brand new decade waiting to start. Who knows what exciting things it will bring?! A happy year end to you and the very best of the New Year 2020 and the coming decade! 

Write ...Edit ...Publish ... + IWSG October 2019 : Horrible Harvest

Creeeeeak!!

That, dear Writers, was the sound of the October Challenge opening at Write...Edit...Publish..., so click ye forthwith and link up with your post URL directly over there. There are multiple prizes this time. Quick!…the linky closes on the 18^th…What’s that? you don’t do horror…you have no dealings with zombies…nor vampires…and...supernatural beings just don’t...um...rock your socks? 


Not a problem! Write what you fancy and interpret the prompt whichever way your heart dictates. I am doing that myself and sticking doggedly to the photo-essays … :) Because there are only three rules at WEP – no genre restrictions, no genre restrictions, no genre restrictions (except erotica). No, four - another one re word count.

Come  join the fun!

Grow. Yield. Reel.

Memory is a late afternoon shimmering in the backyard, if it could be called a yard, because there was no fencing, no boundaries. The front of the house came with some kind of a rudimentary driveway at least.  The backyard ended where Matthias the gardener had decided to stop hacking the scrub bush, marked vaguely by a giant wild fig.  The bungalow style quarter had an oddly  long, narrow footprint - memory is that house in all its minute detail though I spent most of my waking hours outside – either at the front gravelled driveway, or in the back, watching the antlions’ dens…the comings and goings of tiny animals…the young household help inexpertly slaughter a chicken.  I would come back from school, slip into a muslin chemise which for reasons unknown was called a ‘penny’, have some lunch somehow and  rush outdoors as soon as the ‘sun’s-too-high’ curfew was over.



After the first tumultuous year, Matthias and my mother planted a kitchen garden between the back patio and the fig. I was not too fond of vegetables – the Indian bitter gourds, the terrible bitter dishes of neem-aubergines which were cooked with shoots freshly plucked off the neem tree on the far side of the garage. The pale squashes and cauliflowers and squat looking cucumbers – I mean, what self-respecting kid likes those? That harvest was as horrible as it could get.

My mother spent a heap of time in lynx-eyed vigilance against creeping and flying pestilences that might descend on her beloved veggie patch. The budding of the aubergine, both flower and fruit, were Events – marked with the quick spontaneous parody of famous Tagore songs, much laughter and general celebration. The garden cramped my style a bit, because I had been used to setting up my own games under the shade of the fig, but now Matthias had flowerbeds in front and this densely planted veggie garden in the relatively well-shaded, more private back. Around which I had to tiptoe lest the plants get disturbed and stop growing.

He told me off for stepping on a squash vine once and when I complained to my mum, she heartlessly sided with him and said I should stick to the porch. And why was I roaming around outside in front of the gardener in a flimsy, strappy chemise without a proper dress on anyway?  Don’t do that girl, you are not a child anymore. But though I learnt to put on and keep on a dress over the chemise, even on shimmery hot afternoons, I remained a child for a long time after.

As every parent knows, growth is a step function, it happens in spurts. My growth was signposted by deaths in the family. The first was catastrophic – though I was too young to appreciate its overarching implications at the time. A few months into our relocation in Nigeria, my father’s young brother-in-law, the youngest son-in-law of the family at Dover Lane, died in his early thirties.  It reset the family dynamics forever and tightened up my relationships with Dover Lane and its residents subsequently. The second death was that of my grandmother, the one who left a legacy of pickles, priceless lessons in grace and minimal gold value. Life and death both have their own strange, irrevocable ways of growing people up, wherever the individual may be on the learning curve. Witnessing grief is the first step to navigating it  - an education in itself. But the scariest growth spurt, the most horrible of the harvests was still to come.

***

The kitchen garden disappeared like a puff of smoke when we moved to Bauchi. That tiny town-suddenly-elevated-to-state-capital was wholly unable to cope with the rapid and massive influx of the relocated personnel. There was no place in the government facilities, there were no starred hotels in Bauchi then, only the government rest house. Which was full up with other officers, come in from the trifurcation of human resources. Only one of my father’s Maiduguri colleagues was allotted quarters. I have no idea why, but my father was accommodated in the guest annexe of the bungalow of a British officer,  at that time possibly the seniormost expat in Bauchi. There was no kitchen, I’m sure the lady must have made an offer to my mum about dining arrangements, but neither party knew the other, so obviously my parents did not want to intrude more than they already were. We ate at my father's colleague's quarters, and slept at the Brit officer's. Seriously weird system, but the discomfort of sleeping under a perfect stranger’s roof kept my resentment at the relocation simmering pleasantly along.

Courtesy: Malini Mehan

In time we were moved into a house, three bungalows away. It was a complete contrast to 46, G.R.A., Maiduguri – an ancient, stone-built three-bedroom colonial property dating from the 40's or 50's maybe. My bedroom was really a wide passageway - it had no door, and no washbasin, unlike the one I had just come from. No wrap around balconies here either, no ceiling fans, instead a fireplace in the living area! Also a driveway lined with a row of mature, tall, pale-barked, probably gmelina trees. They would fill up with caterpillars once or twice a year. Apart from the trees, the rest of the compound was bare, beaten earth. I’m sure it must have been landscaped originally, but nothing of that was in evidence. There was no question of our planting anything, because there was no extra water. The supply was brought round by tankers at periodic intervals. The taps would often run dry before the tanker called. I hastily learnt to be economical. My mother gave up all notions of growing Indian veggies pronto – the only good thing to come out of the move from my perspective.  

But unbeknownst to all of us, she was growing a far more sinister crop. That, when it ripened, grew me up completely and sent me reeling into adulthood.


WC - 986
FCA


Read the other entries here: 

Write...Edit...Publish...+ IWSG : August 2019 Red Wheelbarrow

It's time to get back to Write...Edit...Publish... this month and I'm still with essays. Or memoirs, if you prefer. But there's a slight difference this time, more about that later. Here's my entry for Red Wheelbarrow...

Wheeled In, Wheeled Out

Memory is a cloud on a Himalayan slope, slinking in through the open shutters and leaving everything misted with a certain coolness, bedewed with moisture. Memory is a jewellery box, an old radio, a cigarette holder between gnarled fingers; it is a suburban house that morphs from cage to polestar depending on who is looking and if they are inside or out. It is a mossy pump housing against which pinwheel flowers bloom.  A rockfall on NH 31 somewhere near Sevoke, the Coronation Bridge on its peripheral vision. The smoke from a grandmother’s coal fired stove stinging early morning eyes. And it’s also a decrepit wheelbarrow that Matthias the gardener wheels in from somewhere with a heap of suspiciously smelly black lumps. 

Memory is forever a smell – of animal dung fertiliser, of petrichor, the rains hitting parched ground in a needle thin, sharp sheet of silver. Of the bushfire crackling across the drive from the windows, of your mother spraying you playfully with Revlon’s Charlie as she completes her dressing to go out. Everybody was crazy about that perfume in those years caught between kiddiekidness and grownuphood. The Harmattan haze like teased out cotton candy falling on the bougainvillea, just like that Himalayan cloud only a different colour, a different smell, and dry as a bleached bone.

From Dover Lane to Delhi. And then wheeled across several borders and seas nearly 7000 kms away, only the world hadn’t gone metric yet so it was all miles still. When your mother told you that you all would have to leave Delhi - your school, your friends, your entire hitherto familiar world, you don’t remember being overly dismayed. Which was strange for a child, now that you come to think of it more than four decades later. But the bonds loosen automatically as soon as another home, another city, another life of a different texture dawns as a possibility on the horizon. That is what it has been like for nearly all the moves, bar one.   

Memory is the name of a friend from a childhood city, a fixed telephone line recalled from another one, the exact sound of your father’s car turning into the driveway when you were thirteen.  It is an atlas first and later a spinning globe, seablue and mudbrown and icewhite and all the little countries marked out in different colours – India in pale lime, Nigeria in peach. Memory is a strange sequence of numbers and words – 18/68B Dover Lane and E-79 NDSE Part I and E-823 C.R. Park and 46, New GRA. That small white painted sign listing next to the culvert and the green 46 stencilled on it - memory is even tinier than the footprint of that sign, but still as huge as the 46+ years that have lapsed since you saw it first.

Parents and I in Maiduguri, early 70's.

***

Airports in the early 70’s were more basic everywhere, at least those you travelled through. No sleekness or softness anywhere, no gleaming granite floors, no fancy lighting. Signages were cruder, functional. No barcodes on baggage - bags got misplaced regularly. A collection of hard chairs and hard floors, uncomfortable seating arrangements in less-than-plush transit and departure lounges. Planes, on the other hand, had something called legroom and seats that reclined more than 5 degrees, even in economy.  

Rome had uniformed security personnel toting machine guns and an air of complete chaos – intimidating.  Heathrow even back then bristled with maps to go, the underground one was your favourite right from the first. Kano had bright blue and orange agama lizards alongside the runway, stopping to nod, nod, nod, three times in quick succession, before skittering on. So much more interesting than the drab sand coloured geckos on the walls back home in Delhi. Maiduguri was a windsock and a control tower perched on the fringes of the Sahara when you landed on 29^th April 1972.

Memory is a child’s delight at finding the bottle of Coke supersized by a continent move, just like that - 300 ml instead of  the 200 ml available at the local paan biri shop in C R Park. It is the wonder at seeing the baobab illustration in a favourite vernacular story book come alive in the Sahel, so close! After the first roundabout in the GRA and then again just before the turn into the drive of 46. Something that a fictional hero might have sat under, now miraculously available within the range of your own senses, to see, to touch, to scoop out and eat the tartness of it fruits.

***

In the square hollow created by the garage, walkway and the external wall of the kitchen, your father planted a golden cassia sapling for shade so that future visitors had somewhere to park their cars. It grew ramrod straight, its lower branches longer and heavier than the higher ones, like a comical Christmas tree, the whole idea of shade and parking somehow gone wrong. It topped the roof and rose higher in the years you spent there. Memory is about vaguely wondering now, 46+ years later, if that tree in 46 GRA still stands, and if by chance it does – has it grown a canopy under which a car can be parked for shade on a scorching hot Sahel afternoon? Memory is all about not knowing and having no means of finding out.

Leaving for Bauchi, March 1976.

In the album there's still the last photo of your family with friends come to see you off when your father was relocated out of Maiduguri. Your face reflects your misery – the only time you were beside yourself with desolation, completely out of love with the idea of a move.

The humongous North Eastern state had been carved up into three, and two brand new towns needed to be built up – from almost-villages to the state capitals. Resources in Maiduguri were allocated to the new states and your father was one such resource allotted to Bauchi. So goodbyes were said, the last bread broken, promises of undying friendships made and addresses exchanged. One March morning, NES 4579 was loaded up. You sat at the back window with an entire universe worth of resentment churning within you, your elbow against a pile of stuff teetering on the seat, held up at the other end by your mother’s help, Balai. And so you were wheeled out of 46 New GRA  and the Sahel for the last time.

WC 1070 FCA

I'd be particularly interested to hear your views on the second person POV in the excerpt above.  Do you think it works? Does it distance you from the narrative? Would you prefer to read memoirs in the first person only? Thank you as always, for your feedback.

Incidentally, 'Sahel' is an Arabic word meaning shore and it is used to refer to the fringe of the Sahara. The Sahel Savannah is a geographic zone stretching more than 3000 miles across Africa, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea.

This is a scheduled post as I am travelling this month. I will be reading as and when I can, but will catch up with each one of you once I am back. Meanwhile, happy reading!

Write...Edit...Publish...+ IWSG : Caged Bird June 2019

In life nothing is constant but change, and I'm dealing with a whole slew of them. Some changes are expected, I'm okay with those - seasons, months, growth, the expected transitions...but not all. Especially discomfort-inducing are those changes which happen too fast and without reason, descend on me with a rush like a rockfall. But...thankfully, some changes are reversible. Storms in teacups, not much harm done to the cups or the tea. C'est la vie... the idea is to keep calm and carry on writing...at Write...Edit...Publish...  - where I’m continuing with my photo-essay spree, and it is strangely apt that someone who taught me the definitive lessons on navigating change, should be the subject of it. 

The original is way over word count, so my entry consists of a few sections only. To explain the title - the person was a posthumous child, his losses started even before birth and carried on from there.

Born into Loss

S.N. Maitra with two of his grandchildren at 18/68B Dover Lane in 1982.

Three things are indelibly associated with that time and place, and with him – the wall clock, the tobacco water-pipe, and the small radio with the wooden fascia. I asked about them years later, but they were gone by then. Sold off to the junk-dealers because the radio and clock had both stopped working. Not sure what happened to the water-pipe, maybe the scrap traders got it for the metal.

Unlike his wife, he left me nothing tangible. No childhood presents, no souvenirs, not even a book with his name signed on it. No photograph albums, fat chance! - no such luxury. There’s just one photo I have, with him, my little cousin and me together in one frame, the one above, I was nearly an adult then. But he did leave me three clearly enunciated names – Meghna, Machhpara, Faridpur. And he left me an example of how to calmly navigate change and carry immeasurable loss without disintegrating. Intangibles all. Nothing that I can quite close my fist around, but all worth holding on to.

He had a cigarette-holder too, small, jet-black with a filter incorporated, in which he occasionally smoked a brand called Capstan, one cigarette cut carefully into pieces, for reasons of economy rather than health. The family was hard up even then, even with his elder son working at a renowned architectural firm in the city. A decade back, the father had sold off his last valuable - his gold watch, in some vaguely grand, O’Henryesque gesture, to pay off the backlog of hostel fees of his adult child, without which the said child would not have been able to sit his final university exams. A whole cigarette in one sitting felt too extravagant still. 

  

Everything was eked out, cigarettes, coal, postcards. The last item he filled with XXS size handwriting, beautifully formed letters by a rocksteady hand, without a hint of a tremor, even when he was 90+. But again, I get ahead of myself, I was the recipient of those 15-p postcards in teenage, where an entire week’s worth of family news was written on less than 50 square inches. But then Bengali is a compact script, there are hardly any loops and flourishes below the line. There was a singular lack of loops and flourishes below the line in our lives then, his and mine.

  

The room had several windows, green louvred with straight, black, vertical wrought-iron rods - forbidding, cool to the touch. The ceiling was low, the floor was set a couple of steps down from the landing, the same polished red oxide as the rest of the house. The door frame was smaller, lower than the others in the regular rooms on the upper or ground floor. He was a tall man, very spare, very upright, he must have had to duck to get in. There is, of course, more to being caged than a cramped room and straight bars on a window. And one man’s cage can be his grandkid’s polestar.  

  

***

I once asked him why he didn’t show the papers of the village property and get due compensation that the uprooted from East Pakistan were given by the Indian government. His told me that there were other branches of the family still living in the property, the papers were with them, naturally. Besides, where was the chance? We didn’t really plan this move, we didn’t flee as refugees, we came here to work, to get our children educated. We just got trapped this side of the suddenly sprung-up border. There was no way to go back.

  

I don’t really know how that feels, I was born years after the Partition. But I can take a good guess.  From the rambling, many-roomed, haphazard homestead with four courtyards, built over centuries a wing at a time - to a new built, two-storey, tiny, suburban house with a courtyard the size of a hanky. From being one of the first families in a small village where everyone knew him by name to the huge anonymity of a city of millions. From the collective memories of generations rooted in the same patch of land to one where there was no memory to draw upon. No templates for living life - the old ways rapidly disappeared, the new ways were not yet devised. 

  

Sapta purush jethae manush shey maati mayer baRa – where seven generations have been brought up that land is greater than the mother.*  How to negotiate a change of citizenship in which your own birthplace, the land of your ‘seven-generational’ ancestors becomes foreign and forbidden to you? He lived nearly half his life in Dover Lane, away from his home and birthplace, both forever out of his reach. It must have been excruciating. Trapped on this side of the border. We are all trapped by our respective borders and yet we can never know the exact nature of anyone else’s struggles, regardless of how close they are to us. 

***

  

One Wednesday afternoon in April 1986, my father called me at work. Come to Dover Lane. By then my parents had moved back to Calcutta, my mother was in remission from cancer, I lived with them in their hastily-acquired new home and worked not too far from Dover Lane. 

  

I found the house fuller than usual, my father’s cousins had come by, my eldest aunt, Boropishi was there sat by his bed. She told him I had come – he opened his eyes, looked at me for a long moment but said nothing; and then shut them back again. My grandfather lay perfectly still, his face calm, the eyes shut, the bones of his jaw and chin very prominent, his lips thinned as if some invisible internal force was sucking them in.

  

Shortly after, he sighed  - a long drawn out, rasping groan. The usual rituals were observed, a drop of Gangajal was touched to the mouth. My father checked for a heartbeat and could not find one. The neighbours, who happened to be doctors and had treated him for years, were called in and medically confirmed the death.

  

There was no last minute rushing in and out of hospitals, no last words, no mortal agony – just a peaceful departure. One minute he was there, the next he was not. My grandfather died with the same quiet dignity with which he had conducted himself all his life.  The cage had finally broken and the captive had gone free.



WC 1075
FCA

*A line from a famous Tagore poem called Dui Bigha Jomi (Two Bighas of Land)



Read the other entries here -

Write...Edit...Publish...+ IWSG: Jewel Box. April 2019

If you are looking for my A-Z post that’s here.  I am keeping my A-Z and WEP+IWSG posts separate.

Last month, in a response to my theme reveal for that Challenge, a commenter wrote - sounds like a great way to honour your grandmother with your theme idea for April. And the idea for this post grew from there.  


As with my January post, I am going with a photo-essay, something I hadn’t tried till this year for these challenges.  I am over wordcount here - the original was more than 3000, I just couldn't pare it down any further. My apologies.

Diptych in Progress


Three months lapsed before we came back to the red-oxide floored, two-storied house in Dover Lane. It was an ordinary homecoming, the adults were in control of themselves, everyone was calm, dry-eyed. I, a teenager, did not really know how to mourn.

Empty Waters

The airport is already swankier. Clicketty-click polished granite floors where the carpeting does not deaden footsteps, the concourse wider, an enlarged duty-free, shops glittering with souvenirs – costume jewellery, camels, miniature coffee pots. Sleek kiosks of global brands. Rows of backlit signages, lights reflected off all surfaces like some kind of weird visual echo chamber.

What Absence Shapes

Rickshaw van in Taki

We are on a three wheeler, my cousin and I - three bicycle wheels with a flat wooden platform for seating, the front wheel connected to a saddle for the ‘rickshaw-van’ puller.  A common mode of transport in most of rural West Bengal, in India. The road, after a feeble attempt at being macadamised, peters out to a rich brown, wet mud track. It is mid-monsoons, the season of rains. The growth all around is so lush that the diffuse light of a cloudy day is filtered green through it. The road runs parallel to the river, the glimmer of water breaks through the dense foliage from time to time, sometimes the branches clear up to reveal the waterscape. There are small, pointy boats out, each one with the Indian tricolour flying. We are at Taki at the border - the far bank of the river is Bangladesh. Debhata, Satkhira, Khulna. The names are just as familiar as the Bengali ones this side of the river – Bashirhat, Taki, 24 Pargana.

On happening to watch video instructions on hairstyles irrelevant to the present situation

A Youtube clip on how to do a French twist -

I don't know why I watched it - my hair's cropped

for years now. No long plaits twirled around my wrist

into updos, no chignons, all pins dropped.

And neither the length nor the weight is missed,

the mess of herbs and rinses - all that's stopped.

Not a Samson nor, I think, a narcissist 

whose strength or beauty lay in hair that was chopped.

Yet I watch women twirl young hair into buns

without quite knowing why, and I reminisce 

minor things - lost barrettes in faux tortoiseshell.

Sundays stacked with a certain shampoo-smell.

Undoing, loosening it all, oh the bliss -

tugging it free, finally, when the day was done.

Writing it as it comes and still on target with the title-heavy teeny-tiny though I've no idea where that came from. Is it just me? Or does anyone else watch/read instructions for things they know they'll never have the least urge to do? Hairstyles, recipes, skydiving? :) 

Malfuf wa Malik: Authors, for example...

Ali Bahar (1960-2011) was a Bahraini musician who rose to fame in the 90's with his band Al Ekhwa (The Brothers), arguably the most famous Bahrain has produced. He was called the Bob Marley of the Gulf and also the ambassador of Bahraini music. He died at a tragically young age, but his music lives on here. Listen to one of his pieces while you read -

Arrival. Adjustments. Attraction.


When we look back on anything - any relationship, the current state of it feels perpetual, but that's often incorrect, we are experts at cherry picking stuff to suit us. At least I am, shouldn't really be speaking for anyone else. Looking back at 20 years in the MENA, I can't seem to remember a time I was not interested in Arab culture.  But of course that's rubbish. It takes time to fall under a spell, whether a person, a land or a culture, barring a few rare cases of love at first sight...

The first couple of years in Bahrain were spent being somewhat clingy – rereading old books and working out how to keep cultural headspaces intact in this avalanche of new experiences. Of a totally different language being added to my environment. Adjusting to traffic on the right, to a sky that hardly ever rained, to being a trailing spouse - which was the biggest lifestyle change of all. My childhood shot at being a trailing daughter stood me in good stead. No panic attacks, lots of cable TV, coffee, piles of books and long letters home - telephone calls were way too expensive if I converted the currency.

Agley

Listen, I’ll be late back on Monday.

Again?!

No, it’s not what you think.

Yeah?

I’ve an interview.

I didn’t know you were looking for a change, dearest.

Well, no. It isn’t that kind of interview.

Really? What kind then?

It is a job interview, but I’m not a serious candidate.

What? Then why are you going?

Oh because I’m a filler.

What’s a filler?

There’s this big shot over to recruit some fin props for his company. Anupam has to line up some authentic looking candidates, he asked me to help out. So I’ll be dropping in after work. Can’t refuse a friend in a spot.

Oh I see. Pity.  There was this play on…

I’ll tell Anupam to wiggle my name in early. Don’t want to be stuck there forever. But I might be late.

Okay.

***

There’s a bit of a problem.

Now what?

My name’s got through to the second round.

So? Why’s that a problem?

It’s a waste of time. His and mine. More his than mine.

I thought you were doing it for Anupam?

Yeah, I am. But it’s a pain all the same.

***

Why are you looking like a nuclear disaster?

Dreadful thing’s happened - I got the job! Soon as I walked in he made me an offer. Asked if I had a passport. I was dumbfounded! What am I going to do now?

Did you call Anupam? It’s his mess. He ought to get you out of it. Hang on, passport?? Where is this job?

I’ve never even heard of it.  Have you? Some place called Bahrain.

Yeah, vaguely. Don't know anything about it though.

I don’t know where in the world it is!

Well, look it up in the atlas then. What are you going to do? Accept?

What do you think I am, crazy? How -? Never thought about going abroad at all. Not plan A. Not B or C even.

***

So naturally, six months later we were here.

Best-laid schemes o’ mice and men. Gang aft agley. 

We were experts at agley. 

Still are.