2011 - Remembering Them

And this is for remembering all those that we lost in 2011. From those in Japan, to those in Sikkim, the victims of AMRI, and illegal liquor close home, those in Christchurch, Mumbai Bombings, those in Libya, all the casualties in the 'Arab Spring', to all those close to us that we lost- the brother, the mother, the friend, the uncle, the son, the father, the grandparents, the lover, the wife, the daughter, the acquaintance; and also all those stars of eternal glory - the actors, singers, entrepreneurs, sports stars. You shall all be remembered. 

It Is The Sky I Sing To

It’s the Sky I sing to, and the Sky I sing for.

You should know this. Today, I am no longer afraid of what people might have to say. If you had waited around for a while longer, you would have fought off your fears as well. Only today, I have a fear far more labyrinthine than the one I could have ever weaved when you were with me. A fear that hints at loneliness, at helplessness, at being stranded without a soul to relate with. You were clever in not having stayed back to face these fears. You were cruel to have left me to fight them all by myself.

I have never revealed your secret to your world. Neither to mine. You lured the only ones that knew of your truth over to your side. I had sensed you would try the same with me, and you did. Only, I resisted. Not because I didn’t want my colors to help paint your portrait, not because I didn’t want my soul coalesce into your absence, but because I have to answer to people. I have to live for other people.

You also owed answers to other people. You needed to finish painting the beauty of our world. If only you weren’t in such a hurry.

And now, in dark nights, when I sit alone munching at cookies, you have no right to come and disturb me, to massacre my mental sanctity and peace, the way you do. You have no right to use the estuaries of thought to seek entry into the ocean of my mind, at times when I’m least expecting you to. On Christmas nights, suffocated under thick layers of fog and loneliness, I expect you to call out my name. And every August, every drop of rainfall on my skin reminds me of your fingers teasing me, my face, my hands and limbs.

Today, I can’t sing into a stupid looking telephone, expecting your warm voice at the other end. I do not seek to sing Summer songs or midnight lullabies or Birthday couplets to you through the phone. Instead, it is the Sky I sing to, praying to it to ferry my melody over to you, wherever you are. And who would know it better than you, that it is the Sky I sing for.

Ten Years Hence

I was on a train from New Delhi to Calcutta ten years(minus ten hours) back when I had first heard news of the Beginning of a new Era. Of Terror. Of Hate. Ten years hence, every day seems to be worse than the last, and every year is scarier than the last in terms of Life Security. 9/11 touched us all, and changed us all so much for the worse.

Every time an Abhinav Singh, an Adarsh Mukherjee or a Debanjan Sen leaves the world, there is a little less goodness left in the world. And, a little more disillusionment with the entity called God.

I do not know who or what saved me though. Luck, or love, I don't know what it was. All I know is, it wasn't God. Coz he doesn't exist.

The Ninety-Seventh Post

During those nights when I’d lie lifelessly in my irksomely tiny-and-white bed in the Intensive Critical Care Unit of the hospital, fleeting in and out of a drugged consciousness, sometimes I’d study the screens connected to the bodies of the other suffering souls. Those screens had every possible color depicting the various physical conditions, heart-rates, oxygen-saturation levels et cetera, of the patients, in every possible font. They resembled monsters from across the Vaitarna, one for guarding each unfortunate victim in that room, ready to grab hold of him immediately, should he lose his struggle for life. The suffocating silence looming in the dimly-lit room would be punctured at times by the nervous whispers of the visiting doctors and attendants, the heart-rending moaning noises made by an elderly occupant or the guttural, animal-like loud-cries from the bed housing a man from Kuwait, who I had heard had completely lost his memory after having fallen from about the same height as I.

All of these sight and visions would creep into my dreams, plaguing them, turning them into nightmares. There would be relief from waking from these dreams, only to be reminded that the nightmare I was living, the one I had purchased a permanent ticket to, through exercise of my unquestionable stupidity, carelessness and lack of concern for my own life, was not one I could be ever woken up from. I had fucked up. Fucked up, majorly.

Ma and Baba would visit during the visiting hours, which would be the happiest hours in the day for me. The only hours with human communication, with contact with the familiar, with anything remotely close to happiness, with warmth and love. Ma would also bring me news of my friends visiting me, friends who would come visit everyday without fail, even with the knowledge that I was recovering, even with the knowledge that they wouldn’t even get to see me. In the perplexing sanity of that room, with nothing much to do, I would think of the numerous things I could and would say to each one of them, to my friends and parents and family. So many things I’d own up to, confess, openly scream out, whine about, fearlessly opine about, and ruminate over guilt-free and in public. Now of course, back in the relatable insanity of the ‘real’-world, where every soul is bound by limitations and unspoken, unexpressed, incomplete dangling conversations, I realize, that I’m never going to say all those things I wanted to, to all those several people, ever in life.

Dilwaali Diwaali

There is a dark gully visible from my window. Throughout the year, when the roads are dark at night, the degree of visibility in that particular gully is determined by the extent of waxing or waning the moon exhibits then. The reverse holds as well, and there is this half-finished abandoned-building of a project right across that gully. I have mentioned this building several times before. How certain guys hanging out on the rooftop remind me of Chandler and Joey, and how the moonlight incident on the unused, jutting-out concrete cables makes me poetic, Concrete-jungle moon-sparks et al, and also once about the Blue Windows on the finished portions of the building. Tonight, however, is not quite like the other days of the year. On the occasion of Diwali, there are heavy laces and frills of light wrapped around all the buildings lining the gully, for the purpose of beautification. And though, just like certain Elizabethan literature heroines, these laces and frills seem to suffocate the buildings, the end of beautification has been amazingly addressed. Also, Kali Pujo is the only festival celebrated at the tiny little club in the immediate paara, so there’s a typical Orange-white temple-shaped pandal erected in the grassless field between the gully and our complex. So my room is lit up, red, green and blue. The ‘tuni-bulbs’ lining the box-grills of my window act to the effect, and if only I was a little stoned, my room would have felt like a live hard-rock café, for I even have Vintage Rock from the 60’s and 70’s and some really mellow Sikkimese music playing on the laptop.
Tonight, incidentally, is All Souls’ Day. Bangalis refer to it as Bhoot Chaturdashi. Souls descend on the Western Hemisphere on Hallowe’en. And then their Eastern Counterparts follow suit on Bhoot Chaturdashi. The minute graveyards at Kumardhubi might come awake tonight. Mrs. Jean McGinn, my beloved kindergarten teacher, she might come to visit her son, who threw her out of home, forcing her to eke out an embarrassing living out of rendering private tuitions even after retirement. I hope her soul comes back to avenge the injustice meted out to her. I remember how she was the first person to have put me on a pedestal of importance, by making me class monitor in kindergarten. I have been dethroned from and reinstated into that pedestal a lot of times since, but she made me feel important for the first time I remember, so that love for her, that reverence, I can still feel, FRESH inside me.I didn’t plan this note out; it is just taking a shape of its own. I remember how, before the first day of kindergarten, when Ma brought home news about Mrs Mc Ginn being my class teacher from the orientation program, I had sobbed for an entire day, out of fear arising out of having been allotted the scariest teacher, ‘who threw dusters to burst her students’ skulls’, in the school as Class Teacher. Now when I look back in retrospect, how unfounded and baseless the worrying of that afternoon seems.

The other time, when on Bhoot Chaturdashi morning in 2002, we landed up at the Hazaribagh National Park, and Buiya and I hatched plans of staying back at the National Park, at one of the cottages without electricity, (because we had no such prior plans, there were no proper-cottages booked for us), and how excited we got at the prospect of being visited by spirits from the dead as also Indian Tigers and jackals in the same night, and how disturbed and miserable we had been left feeling, when our parents didn’t approve of the idea, and rejected such a brilliant adventure just because they were worried about the mosquitoes. Both Buiya and I had refused to speak through the entire journey back.
The Diwali of 2005, the year when a blast had ripped the heart of Dilli just before the festival of lights, and our Tarumitra Nature Convention at St. Patrick’s, Asansol, where we planted trees, and socialized with people from other schools, and marveled at the sheer size of the Boys’ Dorms at St. Vincent’s, and the wonderful nature walks, the magnitude of the combined complex of Patrick’s, Vincent’s and Loyola. Also, Francisco Almeida, his attempts at teaching me those little nuances of Portuguese, and the way I was taken into the Anglo Indian Dinner Ceremony, long after the others had made the phone-calls back home, and had returned to the dorms and taken to their beds, and how I saw the art works by the Christian Brothers, and how impressed I had been at the sheer creativity and talent of the young artists. Also, discovering the half-dead rat-baby on the corridors, and handing it over to the Big Man, the planner of the event. The staying up nights with Alok, and dozing through the seminars and sessions the next day. And how Mrs. Sriparna Choudhury, perhaps the calmest and sweetest lady, and teacher ever, passed away to a minor accident a fortnight after this, and how shocking the incident was for the entire neighborhood-town.
Diwali in Jharkhand was so cold, snug and cute. Diwali meant November, and Chhath, and the men and women walking towards the Chhat-Ghat in colorful, fluorescent sarees and translucent shirts, and the huge assortment of gifts to the Sun God they all carried on their heads.Chhat would also mean ‘thekwas’. Every building was lined with diyas, and tuni bulbs, and the temperatures would hover between 9 degrees and 12 degrees, and even then there would be invitations from every house in the colony for the ‘parsad khaana’. Since every house housed a patient of my father or a student of my mum, there would always be the extra respect associated with being Daktarshaab or Medam’s son. A lot of this I have left behind forever. There’s no returning to any of it. But I have tonight. Suddenly now, I’m wishing there wasn’t so much light flooding in through the window. Maybe I’d be visited by a friendly soul. Or maybe Peeves. Mayukh reminds me of Peeves, it is funny really. Tomorrow is KaliPujo/Diwali 2010. Another one in the history of my life, to be fondly recalled later maybe?

Dadu, hues of sepia, and dusty old photographs...

Dadu passed away three days back, leaving behind an even more mitigated proportion of males in my close family. For, I’ve never had any uncle, and I never had the other grandpa. My mom and dad have a sister each, and both my grandmothers are very healthy and active. And also, I have a sister, and I was always closer to Ma than Baba. Even with this humongous amount of feminine presence in my family, I always had Baba and Dadu. Now with Dadu gone, I find my gender representation in my family at irredeemably serious peril.

Also, Baba wanted a photograph of Dadu for the Sraddho ceremony. Thus came tumbling out of the racks, the old, thick, ‘original-full-version-Oxford-dictionary-ko-by-great-margins-beat-karnewaale’ family albums. Well, I had forgotten about the existence of most of those photographs – we were leafing through the albums after that long. I was four, I was two, I was one, I wasn’t born yet, my sister’s birth, my parents getting married. Jodhpur Park, Picnic Garden, Ballygunge Place. Bokaro, Delhi, Ferozepur, Amritsar. Army camps and parties, Bangaali bonediyana , Jharkhand small-town tranquility, the Raybahadur Kumarnath Bagchi legacy, all the great family ethics and values, all the aristocracy-which my ancestors certainly do not hope to see surviving through me...Despite the fashion sensibilities having arrived and departed in cycles – (Floral prints, khadis, checks), the times only moved forward. My weirdly round face chiselled down, my sister now has straight hair instead of the ‘hujoorbujoor’ curls, Ma and Baba’s black tresses and glowing skin have been replaced by salt-and-pepper, and wrinkles. So many of the distant relatives smiling out from those old photographs have since, moved over to the other side. We lost some to accidents, some to diseases and some to old age, the latest being Dadu.

It is the same end which awaits us all. The Inevitable. Only we do not know when it is going to thrust itself across our paths. It is not scary really; rather there is something very poignant about it. And in those old photographs, people look so happy. They all look younger and better than they do now. Some have been married off, since. They all have their own kids- those aunts that were present for my mom’s baby shower( ‘shaad’) before I was born, they are mothers themselves now. Quite some of the people in the photographs have had messy divorces. And there were even a few who spelled their own ends.

Well, THIS wasn’t intended to be a sad and depressing note, but I’m afraid, it is turning out to be one. What I really want to highlight is, Change, truly is the only constant, so, despite cynics and elders and professors telling me off about my lack of a sense of responsibility, or about my immature and unconventional-and-disturbing way of life and thought processes, I am not going to fret about what will happen and when and blaady-blaady-blah. Everything will change, everything will fall in place. As Hagrid had said,”Whatever will come will come and I will have to face it when it does…”