Time and Distance

 

I.

 

I once thought proximity doesn’t count -

wherever I am, I’ll still thrill to the sound

of your name, be able to recreate

the feel of my feet running on your ground.

 

I thought if I just closed my eyes I’d see

your vast skies spinning slowly over me

the sun and the stars don’t discriminate

and yet they now appear differently.

 

Is it my sight I’m losing, or my mind?

The exact textures of things left behind

become harder to recall and replicate.

The thrill’s the same, but something has gone blind.

 

Won’t matter how far I go – I thought that once

but in the end time is the greatest distance.

 

II.

 

I thought I’d be able to grope some recess

and find you, ever changing yet changeless.

Draw up the exact shape of fig and neem,

the acacias in the open wilderness.

 

Some of their limbs remain - that much is true.

The curve of highway, the straight avenue.

But the mind isn’t quite the thing it seems,

it loses the details without meaning to.  

 

I’m not the one to rail against the failings

of sight, and mind, of puny mortal things,

the systems of recall, blurred like a dream,

the lengthening of shadows, the last dimming.

I did think I’d carry you with me once

But time’s proved to be the farthest distance.   

 

III.

 

The sunlight lying in thick slabs on the floor,

but I cannot recall the tiles anymore.

The cement paving in the porch and back,

the size the glass panes were on the main door.

 

The numbers on some of the cars and the crunch

of gravel beneath their tyres. Being served lunch

on a green table cloth. The music tracks.

The crack in the tub. The smell of the sponge.

 

So a few remain – the trivial, the strange,

and strange are the filters chosen to arrange

the sequence, the way the trivia stacks

and what was changeless once begins to change.

 

I thought I could dream you up anywhere once.

But time has morphed itself into distance.

Write... Edit... Publish... October 2023 : The Phantom of the Opera

 

Hello!

It's October and it's time to get back to Write...Edit...Publish... where the prompt is the iconic musical The Phantom of the Opera. It is also splat bang in the middle of the main festival season in India, I have family visiting from abroad as well as from other Indian cities, so...I'll be reading with a lag, please bear with me. 

This post continues the story of Shovan and Mukta, Sam and Janhobi that began last December. What's happened so far:

The MC finds a B/W profile picture on a social media platform intriguing. He writes on an impulse to the woman and finds that the picture is of her grandmother and was shot in a studio that once belonged to a relative, now dead. 

The MC goes back to his hometown and explores the derelict studio. He finally comes upon a series of nudes of a woman in different stages of life, the last of which he recognises as the grandmother.

He finds a letter that breaks the bombshell news that his Great Uncle Sam, the studio owner and the grandmother had an ongoing relationship in the past. 

He meets with the granddaughter in their common hometown and shares the findings...which naturally shocks the granddaughter. The MC assures her that the secret is safe with him and he will support her through this bombshell discovery. They say goodbye but he feels she will not want to see him again. 

The MC goes to Sam's ancestral house situated a little way away from the city and finds the furniture that's used as props in the Janhobi's portrait - the radio, the table etc. He also chances upon an old tree engraving that clearly indicates Sam and Janhobi spent time in the house. Mukta does not get in touch as he had feared.

 

Read on to find out what happens next...

Chiaroscuro VI :

It was pitch dark at the window.

 

My transition from dream to reality was so gradual, so seamless that at first I did not realise I was awake. The noise of the static crackled in my ear just as it had minutes ago in what I assumed was a dream, but now I was not so sure, was it?

 

Inside the room, the eye of the old radio flashed on and off, bathing the ceiling above in an eerie apple green. My cell phone matched it at every beat, the screen lighting up and going dark every odd second, emitting its own peculiar bluish glow. I bent and switched on the pedestal lamp someone had placed next to the bed. The light came on for a few seconds and then it too joined the strange, ongoing sound and light show. In this weird pulsing light, I could see the ceiling fan was turning one way for some seconds, coming to a stop and turning the opposite way for an equal time. I had never seen anything like it - I came bolt upright, the last traces of sleep wiped clean from my eyes.  This was no dream.

 

***

 

I had got back from the discovery of the tree engraving last evening and found that I had been given the room with the radio to sleep. The low divan had been made up with a formidable old three inch thick cotton mattress, spotless sheets, a pair of ruffled pillows and a traditional woven coverlet. I was quite pleased – as I wanted to have a nose around and see if any further evidence of Sam and Janhobi could be unearthed. Though why I bothered I don’t know. Mukta had not been in touch, she had probably gone back after her holiday in the old hometown.

 

I looked at the window again, it was dark still. The phone as it lit up showed the time, still some way to go till sunrise.  I swiveled around and put my feet on the floor, thrust my feet into my slippers. The wide verandah connecting the rooms on the floor was dark and quiet. No other room was pulsing and buzzing like mine. I paced up and down to make quite sure, there was not a single crackle of static, not a pinpoint of light anywhere.

 

There was no moon, no shadows, not even the friendly wink of a single star. The trees loomed against an amorphous sky on the far side of the courtyard – darker shapes in the darkness grading from a chiffony charcoal grey to indigo to pitch black. An owl hooted somewhere. Moth wings fluttered against my face for a second and ricocheted away, I felt the velvety movement on my skin but could not fathom their direction. Only my shut door was thinly outlined in a pulsing green glow – fainter, brighter, fainter, brighter, fainter, brighter – as if the beating of my own heart had been transformed from sound to light and projected into that room behind that closed door.

 

I groped for the switch of the verandah lights and yanked the heavy old Bakelite job on. Nothing happened, not one of the lights came on. I felt my way down one flight of stairs to the landing, where the large, multipaned window opened out on the street and peered outside, the streetlights were not on either. No joy there. I am not easily spooked, I do not give much credence to other worldly happenings – good for a fireside tale on a winter evening of course, but not much else. There must be some sort of electrical snafu, only I hadn’t come across radios switching on and off by themselves, cell phones and fans echoing them without missing a beat. Confined to one room too while the rest of the house was minus power. At least the fan inside would produce some sort of air circulation. It was muggy and hot out on the verandah and apart from a long wooden bench there was nowhere to park. I pushed the glowing doors open again.

 

The static from the radio had resolved into some sort of music – like a number being played at the wrong speed, slower than it should be, the words weirdly garbled, the bass too deep and way off the mark, interspersed with lucid intervals. In dreams he came…that voice which ca… do I dream again?  The fan…is there in sigh… your mind… The music went on, half unintelligible, half clear, the song just hovering on the edge of recognition.

 

The table on which the radio sat had two small drawers, one of them was glowing and pulsing the same way the door had, as if some light emitting source was trapped inside. I went to it and yanked it open. A bunch of pulsing pinpricks of light fluttered out and weaved across the room, finally settling on the ceiling. It took me a few seconds to figure out they were fireflies, not exactly some alien spirit beings from some other world. The sound suddenly cleared up fully and the music played out at the right pitch, the lyrics crystal clear and recognisable – the Phantom of the Opera is there inside your mind… The song drew to its end and the music faded out. A couple of crackles of static and then the green power indicator went dark, the radio switched off and fell silent. I tried the light switch – it worked this time, the lamp flooded the room with dazzling light. The fan was whirring normally again. Whatever weirdness or electrical fault it was, it seemed it had righted itself. I switched the light off, heaved a sigh of relief and went back to bed. The fireflies were still on the ceiling. I fell asleep watching them glowing on and off.

***

I woke past eight, the sun was up and hot. Last night felt unreal. Had I dreamt one of those hyper real dreams?

 

Only thing was the drawer below the radio was still open. I got out of bed and walked to it. A card lay on top of a pile of papers, the whole dusty and yellowed with age. I picked it up – it was one of those fancy invites, gilt borders and lettering…The President of the Cine Club cordially invites Jahnabi Roy to a special screening of the Phantom of the Opera...

My cell phone suddenly beeped, startling me. It was Mukta.

WC : 1077

FCA

Tagline : An old radio goes berserk in the middle of the night...

Read the other entries here:

 

Representation

 

Whole histories lie in torn curtains, crumbed rust

on exposed steel, in cracks on the stair treads,

in your own careless thumbprint on the dust,

a barely there spider web’s single thread

caught briefly in the beam striking the bed.

Ordinary lives summed up by the contents

of desks and drawers, by tattered bookmarks

showing where they’d stopped reading, sure they’d meant

to go on, only it had gone too dark -

pages spelling out their exits’ exact arc.

 

A weekly crossword has been left half done,

you can’t quite bring yourself to complete it

because that feels like a small desecration,

as if that’s tampering, it’s not your remit.

You waver, you neither write nor can you quit.

 

You want to clear the space out and rearrange -

the useless old teapots, the dulled silverware.

No! - you can’t bear the thought of the slightest change.

Let the lifeless represent the life lived there –

the half done crossword, the same cracks on the stair.

Not sure where that came from - except that some of our old window stays had to be replaced because they had got so rusted that the shutters couldn't be shut. It's 60 days into the homecoming? more than halfway to 100 and it's been a lively time - in a good way and also not in a good way. 

I've been to the wholesale hardware market and shopped for stays (because the style we have is so ancient that it is carried only by the bulk distributors, it's a 50 yo house). I've shopped for textiles, storage jars, frames, planters. I've got the last remaining items on the furniture wish list finally done,  I've got the passport done, I've got my first dog bite - so that last one takes care of 'experience something new' for 2023. Anti rabies shots - yum! :) 

We are still jumping through the various regulatory hoops and this time around my stores of patience, never very robust to begin with, have worn really thin. There are so many safeguards yet the mega fraudsters go scot free while ordinary folk like me are driven insane, one needs to sign forms in triplicate and a password to sneeze even. It would be comical if it weren't so uber tedious. 

It is of course Gandhi Jayanti (birth anniversary) today and the festival season in India begins on the 14th. So the good times are set to continue, as family from Mumbai and Lucknow will be visiting. And cousins are here to attend from the USA as well. There's the spookfest challenge at WEP too...like I said, happy-busy month, hopefully. 

Happy October to you too and happy festivals, whichever you may be celebrating. 

Renewal

 

You have to walk uneven footpaths

where workmen have dug up the bricks

and show the housing of your heart

beyond your body and its ribs.

 

You must steer through old tree shadows

lying in wait like feral beasts

the leaves like spears from ancient wars,

warnings laid down on modern streets.

 

You must look straight at flinty eyes

and never even once must you flinch,

you must prove, whatever your crimes,

legally they amount to nothing.

 

You’ll spread out your life in bills and cards

the locations of all your roofs

a lifetime of paper innards

in forms that are government approved.

You must learn to wait, and be dismissed,

you must know how to stand in queues,

carry on as though it counts not a bit

that your probity must be proved.

Passport renewal - totally an eyeroll-worthy process I'd have thought, especially In Kolkata where illegal immigrants are brought in by some shady politicians and given Indian i.d.s including passports to inflate their own vote banks. So it takes time and there's a police verification involved for everyone, no exemptions. 

The last time my passport was renewed here, Kolkata was Calcutta and I was not present at home when the authorities came in to verify - I was at work and my blood family and in-laws managed it between them. That was in 1992, long time! - the renewal was necessary due to the change in marital status and the consequent changes. 

Subsequently, my passport has been issued by embassies abroad, pretty smooth process, no verifications, nothing hassly. I was expecting this time to be a contrast, but surprisingly it wasn't too bad. The new one came through less than a week after the police verification was completed. 

This was my second interaction with the Kolkata Police recently, I had gone to the local P.S. for a clearance certificate before leaving for Fiji  last year. We'd been told to apply online and it had come through in 48 hours flat, no time at all. 

Our films and stories and even the neighbourhood gossip always paint a negative picture of the police, but my real life experiences with them has been quite the opposite. I have been in police stations multiple times and have been treated with courtesy, efficiency and exemplary professionalism each time. I also have close family members who have been victims of burglaries and the police has unerringly recovered the stolen items within weeks. Therefore, I am a fan of our police force and this is my own small way of countering all the negative stereotypes flying around.  

In Memoriam

 

Ma. Possibly in Agra in the late 1960s.

A birthday is a hollow sock

when the person’s gone,

stockings empty of the present,

no chats on the phone.

 

A birthday is flowers and vase,

and some photographs,

a looping back and touching base

and cupcakes on behalf.

 

A birthday is a cloudy mood

the weight of milestones,

a mixed up bit of pensive glad

and darker undertones.

 

Although the day's a mooring too - 

pinning the year in place,

a chance to dial the chaos down,

to renew and retrace.

 

A thumbing of old albums and

a rough-edged thankfulness

that we had what we had when they

lived at the same address. 

Something like a footfall

 

Not everything falls into place at once.

The paperwork. The people. The connects.

Maybe the days are a test of patience.

The darkest nights not restful but suspect.

 

The moon’s not a tilak on my forehead.

An angry sun reluctant to kindness.

The purple flowered vine’s gone dry and dead.

No one’s at home at the given address.

 

Yet in the twilight between day and night

there’s something like a footfall on the stairs

and a bunch of fireflies in zigzag flight

the scent of flowers opening somewhere.

 

So I will wait. I’ll wait and pace the grounds

maybe in time someone will come around.

Patience has never exactly been my forte, but still. Keeping calm and pacing the grounds....maybe if the vine is watered it'll revive? 

However, as the most famous independent journalist of India said somewhere - what's crumbled in the last ten years is never coming back. My heart sinks a little every time I think of it. 

Hearts are not made to sink though, they are buoyant little persistent things, always finding space to wriggle and rise, to balloon, to beat, to hope. 

This too shall pass. Everything passes - the bad, the good, the ugly. 

Wishing the good in your week a super slow passage, and the bad a lightning fast one. 

Idle chatter

 

Screengrab from Scroll.in 

We were just chatting, mulling things over –

falling bird populations and their lovers,

the erosion of earth, secular values,

the policing of garments but not the shoes.

The hair, the torso and their approved covers.

 

All around us, the entire city was loud –

the traffic, the politics, even the clouds.

Many had forgotten how to coexist

with their neighbours, voted in jingoists,

ignored the rights the constitution allowed.

 

The voiceless are always sidelined and othered

whether human beings or a plain looking bird.

It’s been years since you’ve looked at those on the fringe

or thought about them, shifted even an inch,

nor turned down the volume so they could be heard.

 

Only the rich and resplendent are prized.

The ordinary’s always marginalised.

We sighed, fell quiet as old friends often do,

by and by the silence was pierced by a coo.

Some find a song even when they’re compromised.

 

I wondered aloud if that was a good thing? - 

bird populations going down singing?

My friend stared and said, ‘not even a slim chance!’

But the universe does find its own balance,

with or without men and their petty failings.

It's been the usual crazy out here. Just scooting in to post this and scooting right out again. If the gadget on the sidebar shows the number of posts in any month being less than the regulation requirement of four - that gives me the heebie jeebies. It's super strange that I should be able to post through the most monumental, hectic life changes and then suddenly can't because well, I've come back home now, all the travelling and relocations finally done and dusted. It happens only in India! :) 

I was part (albeit the silent, listening part) of a conversation centred around falling bird populations, which an elderly Calcuttan was lamenting. Both this post and the last one came out of that. That and the non-stop churn of the fake news machines and the whatsappisms. 

Birds are not only birds of course. They are harbingers of hope, they are ill omens of death too. They are symbols of wisdom and peace as well as greed and evil, their nests are used for marketing models as well as the most beautiful metaphors for home and women's eyes. They are part of our mythology and idioms and slang, and life in general, in overarching ways. It boggles my mind to think of losing them, or of any other, less resplendent species, or less resplendent populations of humans for that matter. Who decides what's the definition of resplendent anyway? Diversity is what makes the planet and the nations beautiful, inclusion is a necessary condition of survival, even of the most ordinary. Without the least resplendent, we all wither and disappear. 

Have a brilliant week. 

Shunned by Sparrows

 

Photo by Milin John on Unsplash

There used to be more crows and sparrows

in the morning, pecking the backyard.

Now the roads are wider, lanes are narrow

pillows are cloud soft but life is hard.

 

Used to be doves cooing at midday

marking the sleepy afternoon,

now the skies are an ominous grey

the tides rise but ebb out too soon.

 

It used to be that Kishan produced

endless garments to cover our backs,

but now that’s changed – ignored, reduced,

our bodies are stripped, minds under attack.

 

Beware of cities the sparrows shun,

peace starts with the birds, the smallest ones.

You're only creating trouble for yourself if you blithely write things like 'see you soon' and 'hope to get back into usual routine,' how naïve is that anyway? - after a gazillion relocations? Yeah, well...

The house still looks like a disaster zone, okay, maybe a disaster zone after the Red Cross has made a round, but that's about it. The bookshelves still have Emily and Isaac rubbing shoulders. Not that I have anything against anyone rubbing shoulders with someone from a different era and genre...don't believe in that sort of discrimination. But it does make locating them difficult. The good news in all this is, there's been no time for any reading, neither poetry nor sci-fi. 

It's also partly the reason for the disaster zone remaining a disaster. When I am away from India, I follow the news, fret and fume, but have enough control to hold my tongue. Once the distance vanishes and I am in the thick of things, it's quite impossible to remain silent. Keeping things straight, even in my own mind, consumes every atom of energy. And there are always the various dens of bureaucracy to run around to, the endless applications for this, that and the other to fill up, the nonstop officialeese to deal with...'officer I can't access my xyz/yes ma'am, that's because you are non resident, you can access it only from abroad/but officer, I am resident now, we've come home for good/ma'am, in our records you are still non-resident, you have to be here for 6 months before that changes/what can I do to change it now?/you could write an application, ma'am..."  Who said coming home to ye olde motherland was going to be easy breezy?  (Sigh)

So there it is. It's not that I've stopped writing (that's like breathing, can't hold it in for too long) but editing, polishing, and putting it together to put up here has not been within the realms of possibility. I'm not writing 'see you soon' and jinxing whatever chances I have of achieving that. 

Have a wonderful September! I hope mine allows me to be online here more frequently as things regularise. 

Write ... Edit ... Publish ... August 2023: Chocolat

Hello writers!

It's August and it's time to get back to Write...Edit...Publish... where the prompt is the delightful film Chocolat based on the book by Joanne Harris. Mine is a scheduled post this time as I am relocating from Fiji back to Calcutta, so forgive me if I am a bit late with my reading and commenting.

This post continues the story of Shovan and Mukta, Sam and Janhobi that began last December. It's turning out to be a kind of double scoop sundae romance story in a story... 

What's happened so far:

The MC finds a B/W profile picture on a social media platform intriguing. He writes on an impulse to the woman and finds that the picture is of her grandmother and was shot in a studio that once belonged to a relative, now dead. 

The MC goes back to his hometown and explores the derelict studio. He finally comes upon a series of nudes of a woman in different stages of life, the last of which he recognises as the grandmother.

He finds a letter that breaks the bombshell news that his Great Uncle Sam, the studio owner and the grandmother had an ongoing relationship in the past. 

He meets with the granddaughter in their common hometown and shares the findings...which naturally shocks the granddaughter. The MC assures her that the secret is safe with him and he will support her through this bombshell discovery. They say goodbye but he feels she will not want to see him again. 

Read on to find out what happens next...

Chiaroscuro V : Engraved

The surroundings deepened in colour as one travelled out, even as the bridge was crossed. The skies were incredibly bluer, the earth verdant with a million shades of green and  the air was a clear invitation to breathe deep. I had been so firmly embedded in urban spaces that I had forgotten how beautiful everything got once the city was left behind.

 

Sometime in the 17^th century, a merchant forefather of my mother’s had prospered on the back of the European jute trade. He acquired a tract of land and built a modest home close to a bend in the river. His descendants were to live there and carry on the family business happily ever after. A few centuries down the line however, plastics happened, jute declined, first the World Wars and then Independence and Partition changed the old order.

 

The descendants had quietly eroded away from the river bend to the city. The land had had to be portioned and sold off, but the house remained. By the time my mother got married, the old homestead only drew occasional visits by the family. I had only ever been there as a child, just a hazy memory.

 

Two weeks had passed since Mukta and I had met. It had ended as awkwardly as I had feared. I desperately wanted to ring her but did not know if it would be appropriate. This entire molehill-exploded-to-mountain was quite unnecessarily stressful. Getting out of the city was an escape too.  

 

*** 

 

It was smaller than my memory of it. Entering through the gate into  the traditional courtyard everything felt cramped, the columns not as lofty, the dust adding its own dingy colour to the doors, the round knockers pitted with rust. The front room with its low divan was bare of any mattress or pillows, the old teakwood armchairs were shrouded in yellowed dustcovers, brittle with age. Footsteps echoed eerily on the floors, voices seemed to ricochet round the walls. Mother got busy with her helper in making things habitable. I drifted from room to room, the bustle of people gradually receding as I climbed to the upper floor.

 

A long verandah ran the entire length of the house connecting the rooms. I walked along it into the last one. It was dark inside but I rattled a window open. Light poured in and picked out an arrangement of furniture that felt vaguely familiar – a Victorian table with an empty vase, an art deco radio, a chair with curved claw-and-ball legs. I dusted it off and sat down. Where had I seen these before? It eluded me for a minute. Of course – in the photo! In Mukta’s profile picture, her grandmother’s B/W photo. I sat frozen to the chair.

 

Twilight came and laid a gentle hand over the village in a crescendo of birdsong and a fluorescent arc of lilac light. The peak hour traffic rush was substituted by the field workers winding their way home from the paddies. The post office staff on tinkling bicycles, a distant local train’s chugging making the air throb vaguely without any perceptible sound. Peace made almost tangible. But on the outside only.

 

My thoughts rolled around my brain like pebbles in a shoe, sharp and uncomfortable in whatever positions I jockeyed them to. I jackknifed up from the chair –  the walls closing in suddenly unbearable – and ran down the stairs.

 

Someone called out behind me. I threw an answer over my shoulder.

“Take a torch.” My mother pressed one into my hands. “It’s dark.”

 

Indeed the lights were quite dim, quite a few were missing bulbs. The sky was bright with stars though. The house abutted the river at the back, just a couple of hundred yards from the waterfront promenade. If it could be called that with its half tumbled brick parapet, missing paving stones and ever present litter. The birds had fallen silent giving way to a chorus of crickets. Peace lapped alongside the river, the water ran with a low, continuous chuckling. The moon rose and prodded the waves with a shining finger of light. A breeze started up from somewhere. It was enough.

 

The path back was narrow and dark, surrounded by thickets of bamboo. I switched the torch on. I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere because the gates were nowhere to be seen. It should not have taken this long. Had I really wandered this far? Lights broke though the gaps in the foliage, there was the buzz of voices somewhere, so I kept on mechanically, mulling over this new discovery of the room and its contents.

 

The groves thinned out after a while revealing the house just ahead. There was a huge neem tree against the boundary wall, planted more than a century ago. Its branches soared up many feet above the house, dribbling its leaves over the roof, casting deep shadows on the grounds. My feet stopped of their own accord. I shone the torchlight over it.

 

The beam played up and down over the great trunk of the neem and caught a gleaming speck, it flashed gold as the light fell on it. I drew nearer – it was a chocolate wrapper, plastered flat against the bark by the breeze. I slapped my hand over it. My fingers sank in unexpectedly. Underneath the fluttering wrapper was a small hollow – a piece of bark had been stripped off.

 

As I lifted the foil away, the torch revealed the mark scratched on the trunk, one of those eternal acts of love, or vandalism, depends on your opinion – names carved on trees. This one looked decades old, the edges had healed completely, the exposed wood buffed and smoothened with age. The letters had been slashed deeply, vehemently, into the grain.  They  were now blackened with accumulated grime, but no less emphatic than when they were first made – Janhobi + Samudra, shaped into an elongated but unmistakable heart.

WC - 987

FCA

Read the other entries here :

We have heaps of great stuff going on at WEP - there's the How To Series on various aspects of the writing life. The Anthology Page is now live so that's something we are all super excited about - go check that out for details and get writing! 

And there are always the Challenges, the next prompt is in October and it's based on The Phantom of the Opera - how nifty is that for the Halloween month?!

 

WEP was also at IWSG earlier this month figuring out the fascinating links between chocolate, writers and books. That's worth a shufti too if you're into chocolate, or writing, or both! 

We at WEP are passionate about writing and storytelling in its various forms. If you like the work we do, please do share the posts on your social media platforms and help us to spread the word(s)!  Thank you for your support!