From you, I never could look away
Just like the besotted hero in a Hindi flick
To you, I never could make myself say
Just like the heroine of old Hollywood movies-coy , meek

I thought I shall dream of you
Just as do the women in Mills & Boon novels
I thought I shall pine for you
Just as do the singers in the videos as their faces grovel

Am I in love with you?
Or with the lonely lover due
To whom thrives the culture factory
Am I in awe of your beauty or of the powers refractory ?

Of the ghost of the culture consumer that has possessed me!

Conversation

Clitoris.
Oh! Oh no! read the apology on my face, my friend
It’s so common a word, I know
Yet I cannot, at this moment, recall its meaning
Yet I cannot, at any moment, claim I know its meaning.

Do not glare at me, do not
let me see disdain flicker in your eyes
So what if I have never used it in a sentence?
I know what lummox means and that you think of me to be one

I knew what procrastination means at thirteen when
I had mentioned it as my hobby in a class-mate’s slam book
And crepuscular was what I whispered to myself
Before I began day-dreaming during school recess.

Ah! Do I see a ghost of a smile on your lips?
Just like the one I had seen on my mother’s when
One afternoon I had asked if she knew who a valetudinarian is
And she replied that she did not.

Do not smother your laugh please
For I am not upset at all, I
Who slept with the lexicon by my pillow
Who called a bully curmudgeonly once in the playground

For I never have indeed looked up the meaning of clitoris.

Defending my right to a yellow summer!

Strange are the ways of the economy, and of the people who oversee its functioning. They would not let me engage in what I would like to describe as ‘quotidian activism’! On reading of horrors that processed food items with their innumerable artificial additives can unleash on human health, I decided to not eat packaged or processed food as long as I have other alternatives.
I thought it would be my way of protesting against being fed as ‘food’ items which have nothing save industrial chemicals as their ingredients. Fruit drinks do not have a gram of fruit in them and much sought-after ‘healthy’ snacks have dangerous transfats in them! I thought I ought to protest against this infringement not only of my right to nutrition but also of my right to information, awareness and free choice. To discover that what I have been consuming as ‘healthy’ crackers because they are advertised as edibles containing fibrous grains, are actually laden with artificial flavours snd fats was scandalous for me not merely because the stuff adversely affected my health but because I have been misled into believing that iit is good for me and eventually, into buying it.
It is this culture of influence and control over my food habits by the industrial food production system and its advertising mechanism that I wanted to protest against. But I soon realized that I would inevitably have to break my resolution, change my decision, desert my own cause. I would have become an apostate and not because, I could not resist the temptation of drinking diet cola on blazing afternoons despite knowing that it has been sweetened with artificial sweetner of questionable health impact, or because I could not overlook the convenience of eating noodles which can be cooked in five minutes. I knew I would have to break my resolution because my alternatives are all exorbitantly priced. Only today I paid close to hundred bucks for as few as three mangoes-back at home, when my ma served us mangoes every evening during the summer months it had never occurred to me to attempt to discover anything about the yellow fruit except its ambrosia-like taste. That is all that I had cared for but now when I have to buy it, I discover facts other than this that it is an expensive fruit. I now get an opportunity to brood over the question why is it so important to earn good money. Not because you are not particularly bothered by your conscience that hinders you from becoming a cog in the giant corporate machinery; not because you want a sybarite life-style and certainly not because you crave for the social standing that comes with a heavy purse. You want to earn money suddenly to be able to eat mangoes.
Yes, I just need to brush up my basic economics and I should know that prices of fruits and vegetables are high because presently, the country is smarting under the blows of high food inflation. But I still cannot stop scratching my head-how come the price of mangoes has increased because of food inflation but not the price of the mango-based (so-called) drinks? The cost of potatoes are spiraling upwards but that of a packet of potato wafers still remains ten rupees as it was fifteen years ago when I first began to get addicted to its ineffable taste.
There were other amazing discoveries to make-the fruit vendor on the street sold half a kilo apples to me for eighty rupees whereas at the neighbourhood mall, the same quantity of apples costs fifty bucks. Thinking that maybe my mannerisms of an ingenuous, wide-eyed(so appealing for vendors!) dolt must have convinced the fruit vendor that perhaps she can fleece me as and when she pleases, I decided to confront her if only to prove to her that looks can be deceptive. But alas! I soon squirmed with embarrassment because she explained to me patiently in halting Hindi that she bought small quantities of particular fruits whereas retail giants who run stores in malls bought the entire produce directly from individual farmers. Could she ever compete with retail chains in terms of pricing? No, she could not, she said nodding her head and then asked me how could I expect her to offer as low prices as the malls? I was reminded of one of the lectures in TISS on why is the small vendor or neighbourhood grocery shop badly hit by liberalization.
Thus, I am struck in an excruciating situation-I either, given my paltry income, give up my protests against being forced to become a consumer of processed food items or I continue my protests but end up in the process, becoming a mall customer where fruits are still affordable because the idea of buying greens and fruits from the sweet-faced, smooth talking and slightly condescending fruit vendor in my neighbourhhood, representative of India’s ever accommodating informal sector, is a very costly one for me.

A day in Calcutta

I was relieved after the wedding. It was a lavish affair, and a noisy affair, besides being a crowded one. I enjoyed it as much as a tacit person can enjoy at a friend’s wedding-I chiefly was engaged in observing people through out the evening. But as I said, I was relieved after the wedding and my first trip to Bengal all alone, got transformed from a grueling exercise in desirable social etiquettes and mannerisms as it was at the wedding in Durgapur to a memorable sojourn when on the following day, I went to Calcutta.I had only half a day at my disposal and I was amazed that despite all my wooly-headedness, I could tell Namrata at the Howrah station where she came to receive me, that I should very like to go to a place where I could shop for Bengali books and music. She had nodded her head significantly. We traveled across the Hoogli river in a ferry and then, we walked along the avenues of Dalhousie on our way to a Chinese restaurant where she had wished to take me for lunch. On our way, admiring the colonial architecture of the buildings I commented, “I wish I could stay in one of these buildings!”
“Well, you can. All that you need to do is to find for yourself a groom hailing from any of the old bonedi families of North Calcutta; they live in such ramshackle old mansions.” Namrata said and I scowled in reply. It is very unpleasant, I told her, to hear jokes about one’s own marriage just after one has attended a friend’s wedding. We ate in a seedy restaurant where there were men drinking at 2 in the afternoon. I must have stared at them in amazement for long because Namrata reprimanded me, “Ai takash na obhabe. Tor Ahmedabad e theke ekdom shobhab kharap hoye geche.” (Don’t glare at the men who are drinking. Ahmedabad has clearly ruined your good habits/manners). I turned away self-consciously and that was my only awkward moment of the trip. Thank Heavens! We next went to Park Street and there, at the Oxford Book store, Namrata must have had to undergo a most difficult test of her patience as I quite shamelessly(am I being too harsh on myself, Namrata?) forgot her existence and squatted on the floor of the shop with piles of books. I began going through a Sunil Gangopadhyay omnibus, and also works of Sukumar Ray, Ashapurna Devi, Narayan Gangopadhyay and Shirjendu Mukhopadhyay. In a state of excited fervour, I had also picked Calvino, Mc Luhan, and Roberto Calliso. The book shop is one of the best that I have ever been to and unlike any other book store, has the books in its fiction section arranged in an alphabetic order after the names of the authors!
I could not allow myself to overlook the fact that I had only a thousand and five hunded rupees to spend on books and that I should be rather ashamed if I did not buy a book for my dear, old Baba who always buys books for me whenever he visits any place. It was a difficult task; a grave responsibility. I spend the next hour or so in a state of unbearably sweet agony, meticulously going through each of the tomes, trying to decide which of these works were absolutely essential for my existence. I figured Baba would like Shirjendu Mukhopadhyay’s wry, ironic humour as I much I do and that this could be one author whom both of us could read (unlike his favourite authors Bankim Chandra Chatterjee or Sharat Chandra Chatterjee whose classical style is beyond my power of comprehension given the fact that my Bangla vocabulary is rather limited). I also picked a volume of collected works of Narayan Gangopadhyay, a Calvino book called Adam, one afternoon, a couple of Tapan Sinha movies and a copy of the latest edition of Biblio, which I had last read a year ago in the TISS library! I finally stood up to realize that I have not spoken to Namrata, my gracious hostess in the city for over an hour now. Shit! I hurriedly looked around for her almost expecting to find her, mad at me for making her wait for so long But fortunately, she was reading something herself.(Was it not a book shop that we were in? What else could she have been doing?)
From the book store, we went to-because I hollered in excitement at the sight of the delicatessen- Flurry’s. I told her that I know of this place from the movie Parineeta, and that I also knew that it’s a very old pastry shop. In reply,she smiled indulgently. As I entered it, I had a deja-vu; I was reminded of Causeway in Bombay and its brightly-lit restaurants housed in old buildings.
Finally, when we boarded a local train at the Howrah station to Joka to go to Namrata’s house, we were both pushed and shoved so badly that I almost lost her. It began to rain soon and by the time we got off the train, it was pouring heavily. It was the most unexpectedly beautiful end of an unexpectedly pleasant day-when I had left the blazing city of Ahmedabad a day back, I had not hoped to get drenched in a downpour! Namrata was now looking for a cycle rickshaw to take us home….

Fiction

As I watched her in the dimly-lit room, I felt awe mixed with envy rise in my heart. While I spend my quotidian life as a mediocre nondescript one in the midst of people I don’t care about, doing things that I don’t find remotely soul-stirring, here was a woman in front of me who did the best things in the world, every weekend and not for a living! I was in a club- or in a room that had a faint ambience or appearance of a club-and a few yards away from me, there stood a woman singing. She had a mellifluous voice, entrancing. She was presently crooning ‘Golden Brown’; nay, she did not have the British accent but still she sang well and played the guitar with as much feeling as flair. Dressed in a flowing maroon skirt and a black blouse with a brown bandana tied around her sleek, short hair, she looked how I would want to look myself. She smiled faintly to herself as she, in her sonorous voice, began to sing ‘O Pardesi’ from the movie Dev D. I ruefully recalled how I have to smile everyday too, at people I do not wish even scowl at. Perfunctory smiles, fake laughter, polite small talks-these have become such a major part of life when I wanted to be like the guitar-strumming, bandana-wearing stranger in front me who could smile to herself! She now began to play ‘Sweet Dream’ as she gazed at I believe no one in particular, dreamily. Could it be possible that she has been bewitched by her own voice? Nay, it was the phantasm-like ambience that had moved her as it enchanted me. She was singing the penultimate line ‘For announcing the end of my sweet-dream…’and swaying rhythmically when suddenly a loud, screeching, harsh noise intruded us.
It was the calling bell! Shucks! I quickly took off the goggles and the bandana. I put aside the guitar and hastily took off the ridiculously long skirt to put on the first pair of pajamas I could lay my hands on in the cupboard and ran to open the door. Gosh! Who could come at 9 on a Sunday evening? I opened the door to find a uniformed guard standing. “There will be no water supply tomorrow after 12 noon. The water tanks will be cleaned”, he said tersely and rang the bell of the neighbouring flat while I said a vague ‘thank you for informing’ and shut the door. I went back to my room;the stuff-sun glasses, the bandana, the skirt-that I had hurriedly abandoned, were scattered on the bed and the guitar was on the stool next to the mirror. I looked at them once and decided to cook for tomorrow, tonight itself as there would be no water to boil vegetables in the next day, or to wash dishes!

The List

That my mind is a misty farrago, I never doubted
But neither did I know that there could be order in it
Until I made the list titled-
‘Have no expectations but only aspirations’!

To wake up at dawn to perform Kapotasana
By the end of this month.
To wake up in the depths of Critical Theory
By the end of this year

To travel to Dharmasala alone
Before the end of this summer
To travel to dreams of rationality
Before the end of this life-time

That I had humble aspirations I never doubted
But neither did I know that they could be so arduous.

Ill-effects of dehydration

It has become very common of late: to get bored easily. There is nothing worthwhile about watching the endless cavalcade of automobiles that honk and whiz past the streets outside; there is nothing worthwhile either about reading the countless lines in the tomes that lay on my bed. Habermas made sense because I began with him early in the morning but as the hours passed, my grasp over the text became increasingly tenuous; I could still vaguely comprehend Foucault’s authorship function and epistemes but Derrida’s Deconstruction made no sense at all. It was 2 in the afternoon and I was ashamed of my blunted power of comprehension but actually, I was too exhausted to be so. I wondered if I had failed to make sense of Derrida because the singeing heat outside has rendered my brain a mass of melting wax-utterly useless and a sordid sight.(It is a small mercy that no one can fortunately see it!) Or was I actually too much of a nincompoop to be able to understand Deconstruction? The fan overhead spun clumsily, and I felt a benumbing pain at the back of my head. Maybe, I did not sweat sufficiently because of which I was feeling so uncomfortable. I picked up Bolano’s Nazi Literature of the Americas presently but after reading in it for half an hour about plagiarizing poetasters, hooligan wits and psychopathic science fiction writers, I shut the book and put it away, in horror. Do people write for mere fame or worse, to satiate their tendencies of self aggranisement? Was I likely to become like these writers of Bolano’s imagination ever? Maybe I would if I tried writing, without first trying to understand Derrida or Levi Strauss.
I felt nervous and decided to eat, though I was not feeling hungry remotely. I began eating a paratha but with every bite of it, I felt nauseous. Was there nothing to allay my discomfiture, this engulfing sense of wastefulness? I wished I could sleep but it was too hot to fall asleep. I began watching Charulata and the scene of a rising storm early in movie when Charu first meets Amal, acutely made me conscious of the dry, hot afternoon hour. It was 4 o’ clock and the sun still scorched the surroundings mercilessly. I suddenly wished I could cry myself to sleep and dream of rains at home! But I knew I could not and therefore, continued to watch the classic. Mabhabi-the actress who played Charu in the film-reminded me of Audrey Hepburn while the actor who played her husband-I donot know his name-with his calm deportment, his impeccable English accent and his fervour for reforms, reminded me of my chotomesho. I again found myself yearning to be at home, something that could not be fulfilled and hence, I attempted to focus on the architecture of the house in which Charu lived and its furniture. How beautiful, I thought, were the four-poster beds, the bureaus, the grandfather clocks and the high ceilings and the broad pillars that were to be found in the houses of this land in the 19th century. I now simultaneously wished that I was born in that era and that I could live in a house like that in 2011, even if it was derelict state…Towards the end of the movie, Charu and her husband visit some sea-shore and the sight of the waves suddenly made me realize that I had drank very little water this afternoon. I drank an entire bottle of water in a few gulps and sensed a moist coolness spreading down my throat towards the abdomen. I felt less nauseous and even yawned once! Maybe, I could try sleeping now and who knows, maybe I will dream of myself sitting at my desk by the window in my room back at home and watching a torrential downpour…Ah!

Because you went away to Santiago...

You will now be a reminiscence
Dazzling in beauty
No different from how you were when
you were my day-dream!
Songs will remind me of you
So would passages of esoteric novels
In solitude and in silence,
In musings and in reveries,
And in corridors you would never walk again
Alone, I will encounter you.

Produced on an unproductive Sunday

I never cease to think of this person
Or to care for her
To listen to her stories
And to allay her fears!

To attempt to make sense of her dreams
And to please her fancies
To tolerate her caprices even
Why? Just because she is called I?

Who is-am-I anyway?
Neither Sarah Woodruff nor Anne of Green gable
Just a common consumer is she
Of accolades, apples and electricity, besides maudlin songs.

No different or better than a million others
Then why can I not cease to care for her?
Might it be because I know that
for a quarter of a century now, she has been dreaming?

Of a history of the grand theories in her head
Foolish loafer you may call her, but I will call her a lotus eater
Of ancient tales told in the lost cities in her head
Crazy wench she may seem to you but to me a raconteur.

I cannot not like her, fragile
No less than her gossamer-spun dreams
Besides, she tries to figure why she exists
In her building, a city, a civilisation!

And so do I.

Poetry at the beach...

It is unbelievable that a year has now passed since the trip.
We had submitted the last of our assignments and had a month’s time before we received our degrees at the convocation. I had therefore nothing to do but even then, I was hesitant to agree when Swathi suggested that I should go to Goa with her and Sita and their friends.
I had never been on a holiday without my parents, I had woefully small sum of money in my bank account and I was rather ashamed of asking Ma to send me more money, I did not think too highly of Goa as a holiday destination, crowded and noisy as it would be-I had myriad of reasons for being unwilling to go to Goa. Moreover, there was one reason that I was scared of admitting even myself but which I knew was the main cause of my reluctance-for four long days, I had to be with people and talk to them! I must have bitten my nails for several nights, while wondering if I could tell Swathi and Sita that I did not wish to go with them, because I was unsure if I would want to be with them on all four days…
I eventually did go to Goa last spring. We had stayed at the Baga beach and traveled throughout north Goa in motor bikes; I have vivid memories of the hot mornings when we mostly went sightseeing to forts and churches and of cool, breezy nights when we sat in the beach till mid-night at least. I would invariably be uncomfortable for a while, each night at the beach because I could join my friends neither in drinking nor in their desultory conversations. But soon, I would cease to be self-conscious as with every passing hour, despite the presence of rowdy crowds in the beach, the sea would become increasing beautiful and mysterious. I would watch the silver slivers of the moon on crest of the waves and the distant trees and hillocks, silhouetted against the inky blue curtain of the night sky. In those moments, I intensely yearned that I had the talent for composing verses because I could have captured my impressions of those nights, along with all the ardour, exhilaration and wonder that I felt. Years later, I only had to read them and they would have, as powerful as incantations since they would have been, transported me back to the nights at the Baga beach. Convinced that no photograph could ever be half as effective, I did attempt to create unfading memories for myself at the beach by trying to write poetry but every time, I would give up mid-way, as none of the lines I wrote ever sounded half as beautiful as I felt I and the beach were, then.
A year has passed since then. Except for Sita and Swathi, I have not met or spoken to any of the other people who went on that trip. I have not ridden a bike either-it was in Goa that I last rode pillion behind Sita. I have not been to a flea market again. And, I have never felt so beautiful again.

Dhyana at the Soiree

At the beginning, I was restless.
I wondered if it made any sense for me to be there when where I really wanted to be was the library, as I had lots to read. But it was a recital by the maestro who invented the Mohan Veena-Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and I was curious to listen to him play. So, at 8 o'clock in the night yesterday, I was to be found in a second row seat at the Ravi J.Mathai Auditorium in IIMA.
Initially, once concert began, I simply watched the changing expressions on the musician's visage and his nimble fingers that gracefully played the Veena. I even turned back to look at the audience in the auditorium. But I was still too distracted to appreciate the music, rich and mellifluous though I could feel it was. Was I incapable of appreciating Indian classical music, I wondered but barely for a moment. After all, I had so immensely enjoyed at the concerts of Pandit Jasraj and Pandit Ajoy Chakravarty and I have few memories as stupendously beautiful as the one of the stormy, April night last year when I had sat alone in the balcony of our first floor flat until dawn, listening to a singleKhayal based on the raaga Megha Malhar sung by Sawai Gandharva, while it rained incessantly.
I presently realised that I have a flaw-I am a slave of words, written and spoken. I am incapable of appreciating any form of art or communication that did not involve usage of words and which my mind could not analyse rationally.
It was a stunning discovery, and disconcerting. All around me, people had their gazes fixed on the stage in front of them while a few-perhaps, the most ardent connoisseurs-repeatedly and vigourously nodded their heads, right and left. I could not do either.
I shut my eyes and listened; gradually I began to grasp the cadence of the music that was being played. Concomitantly, images kept fleeting before my shut eyes-the interior of a dark cave that had at a great distance, a very tiny opening through which entered a faint beam of day-light, the silhouette of a beak-nosed man on a dimly lambent window pane.
After a time, the images ceased to appear and all that I was aware of now was the music-the rhythmic flow of sound waves that reached the crescendo once in a while, and constantly weaved intricate, evanescent patterns in the darkness that enveloped me.
When the recital finally ended, I realised so only when the audience began to clap and applaud. I opened my eyes and found myself seated in Sukhasana; my hands were on my thighs in the lotus mudra and my mind was calm. I realised that for the past half an hour or so, not a single thought had crossed my mind and there was not a single human face that I had looked at. There had been nothing between the music and my auditory senses. During that period, I could have been anyone-a Maori woman, an eighteenth century English squire and even a dog or a pigeon!
I had ceased then to exist, as myself. During the recital , thus, I had my first real session of Dhyana(meditation). Thank you, Panditji.

Pagla Dashu rediscovered

Today afternoon, I discovered in the Vikram Sarabhai library at IIM A, a slim volume that transported me back to the soporific summer afternoons of my childhood when I, after returning from school, would lay on my grandmother's ancient four-poster bed and read about the antics of Pagla Dashu, an adorable character created by Sukumar Ray-maybe the first eccentric hero of Bengali children's literature.
The book that I discovered today is an English translation of Ray's Abol Tabol by Sampurna Chattarjee, which contained a story featuring Dashu. One paragraph of Dashu: The Dotty One described the beauty of Dashu's lineaments.
Everything about Dashu-his face, his behaviour, the way he talks-makes it evident that he is a bit dotty. His eyes are as round as saucers, his ear are bigger than necessity demands, his head is a tangle of unruly curls.

Another adumbrates his talent as a wit.
Once he suddenly appeared in school wearing trousers. They were as baggy and shapeless as pyjamas and the coat that went with it looked like a huge pillowcase. He knew just as well as we did what an absurd sight he was but for some reason, this seemed to him a matter of great amusement. we asked him,"Why the trousers?" He laughed and said, "Why, to improve my English!"

On reading the story, I was reminded of a childhood yearning of mine-how I wished that I went to the same school as Dashu did! What a marvellously 'dotty' dude he must have been to befriend...

The Animals in the Meadow

The flower, a single sunflower, was blossoming at the edge of the meadow and I watched it with bated breath. With Kumbhak. I was almost lost in the refulgent yellow of the flower when suddenly a voice, distant yet distinct, pierced through the hue and caused me to open my eyes.
“Ah! Please look at Aminura. Her knees and thighs are not an inch above the ground and this is one should ideally be sitting when performing Gomukh Asana.” The Yoga instructor said, gesturing her hand towards me. She nodded her graceful head in approval and said after a couple of seconds’ pause, during which several pairs of eyes turned in my direction, “I have not met many people who have her flexibility. It does not seem so improbable a thing to say that her body can be folded as neatly as a handkerchief and put away in a handbag.” I could feel that the gazes were still fixed on me but for the first time in my life, I was not embarrassed. Nothing has ever revealed my gaucherie so starkly as have the occasions when I have been commended for some reason. Whenever someone praises me, I involuntarily become stiff and nonplussed and if anybody makes the unfortunate mistake of commenting, even if in a casual manner, that I am ‘looking good’, I implacably turn hostile in the defense of my plainness.
Naturally, therefore, I was surprised that I could accept the generous words of Geeta, the Yoga Instructor, with such equanimity. In fact I forgot them the very next second when I shut my eyes again to search for the lush meadow, where I was a little while ago. I heard Geeta’s gentle voice asking us to stand erect and fold our hands to form the Namaskar Mudra. She said, “You are about to begin Surya Namaskar. Picture yourself praying to the Sun at dawn.” I breathed in deeply and found myself watching the Sun, a sphere aglow, rise from in between two snow capped peaks at the horizon. As the pale azure turned brighter, I too bloomed. I was the sunflower in the meadow in a mountainous valley, I realized.
The next very moment, I grew into a tree, tall and sturdy, when on receiving instruction from the voice to do so, I stretched my arms up and then, to the back while I stood on tip-toe. I next bent forward and saw myself shrinking into a shrub of some kind. I next saw myself morphing into a magnificent steed that galloped in the meadow (while performing Ashwa Sanchalan as a step in Surya Namaskar). I subsequently transformed into a mountain and a serpent. I also became a toad and a tortoise living in a pond in the dale while performing Mandup Asana and Kurma Asana.
Each and every creature in the meadow, picturesque and secluded, was I, myself.
As I finally laid on my back in the position of Shavasana, I visited the verdant meadow for the one last time. The dusk was settling in and a balmy breeze was blowing over it. Under a tree, I saw a little girl sleeping and smiling to herself in her dream, perhaps. I vaguely felt I had seen her before; yes, she is the girl in one of the photographs in my family album-she was me!

A ‘Lady land’, a day-dream and an early Indian Feminist!

I was reading an essay by Barnita Bagchi called Female Utopias and Narratives of Education, when I came across the name Rokheya Sakhawat Hossein. The name was familiar and I could vaguely recall that she was an early 20th century reformer who had written extensively about the multifarious oppressions that Muslim women of Bengal faced. In the engaging essay, Ms. Bagchi cites a work of fiction authored by Hossein in which she adumbrated a very radical female utopia. The story is called Sultana’s Dream and the utopia was named ‘Lady land’. Bagchi’s exegesis of the story as an impassioned protest against then-prevailing gender inequities, triggered my imagination and made me look up for information on Hossein.
I discovered soon that there had lived in this country from 1880 to 1932, a visionary who like the Renaissance Men who lived half a millennium before her, felt that education was the key to enlightenment and enlightenment led to empowerment of the silently suffering women. Hossein had herself, much against the wishes of her conservative father, secretly burnt mid-night oil for years to learn Bangla and English. Sultana’s Dream must have across to the readers of the Indian Ladies Magazine in which it was published in 1905 as a humorous tale, a light-hearted fantasy in which an Asian Alice lands in a Wonderland in which everything is rational and realistic except for the fact that women are at the helm of affairs and men have to live behind veil in their Mardana quarters. These two aspects made the story a ‘fantasy’ and the realm in which it is set, a ‘utopia’ yet as I read the story online on http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a1128.pdf, I could not come across a single argument or one circumstance that led to the establishment of the Lady-land that seemed incongruous or far-fetched. Sister Sarah, the inhabitant of Lady-land who befriends the wonder-struck protagonist Sultana and takes her there, explains to her how ridiculously irrational is the Purdah system which is foisted on women in India.
“Men, who do or at least are capable of doing no end of mischief, are let loose and the innocent women shut up in the zenana! How can you trust those untrained men out of doors?”
The story is a celebration of the scientific ingenuity and industrious demeanour of women-qualities which they are never allowed to hone in the chauvinistic societies because they are made to believe that they are physically frail and vulnerable. Sister Sarah points out the inefficacy of the argument when she says, “A lion is stronger than a man, but it does not enable him to dominate the human race. You have neglected the duty you owe to yourselves, and you have lost your natural rights by shutting your eyes to your own interests.” The women in Her land run a government that does not stink of corruption, its universities her headed by women who have invented contraptions that can trap energy from the Sun and water from the clouds as well weapons that do not kill war-mongering enemies but manage to make them concede defeat. The ‘wonders’ that women are capable of are limitless and also, unimaginable in the patriarchal societies existent in the third planet of the Sun and that’s why those are to be termed as ‘wonders’. That probably was the message that Hossein wished to convey to her readers but for me, it had another meaning.
Sultana ‘was dreaming’ of Lady land; it revealed that in dreams is to be traced the inception of visions, revolutions, aspirations; of alternatives that our conscious thinking mind conditioned to reconcile to seemingly insurmountable realities, cannot imagine.

While riding the rickshaw this morning, I realized…

My eyes are still swollen from crying last night, my heart still excruciatingly heavy, my mind still benumbed because I could not chide myself away from day-dreaming about you all night. But why should I so much be in love with you when maybe in Buenos Aires, behind the counter of a little book-shop or in Alexandria, in the curator’s office of a museum, there is someone just like you whom I never shall run into once in a while and look away, and hence, will never have to cry over? Why should I get distraught by the sight of huge, swanky automobiles on the same streets on which little children try to sell riff-raffs under the scorching sun all day when maybe in the verdant plains of Kaziranga or high valleys of Cherrapunji, there are still boys and girls who pray to the mountains and marvel over the mystery of the mist? Why should I dress well each morn when maybe, in a village in Ulan-Bator, there is someone who wears one bottle-green pullover every day, week after week? Why should I think that I am a woman, respectable woman with education, when maybe in the atlas, there are places where I would be treated as a man married to a forest? Yesterday night, Mr. Borges told me that I should not because he can help me ‘postulate’ my own Uqbar if I wish to.

Storm over the tea-cup

I
“The girl is too beautiful to be single.” I blurted out and immediately regretted it. “Oh! How could I say anything so unenlightened?” I ruefully asked myself. Just because a woman is beautiful, it does not mean she draws or desires to draw male attention to herself. “I am ashamed of you,” I heard an indignant voice in my head, chide me, “for letting the toxin of parochialism still persist in you.” Shamefacedly, I tried to change the subject matter. “Do you plan to have dinner in the canteen here or at home?” I asked.
“Well, let me finish my lunch first. I promise I shall ponder over your crucial questions as soon as I am done with it.” Anila replied with a grin. And at that moment, amidst the din of the canteen, I suddenly found myself imprisoned in a gaol of silence; it was the silence of her grin that derided me for once again failing to follow another of my lofty principles that I had ‘decided’ to practice. “No, no. Don’t make thoughtless comments about people ever again.” The indignant voice in my head spoke again.
II
Anila watched Padmasena as the latter’s face turned crimson and thought, “The foolish woman is too full of ideals and ethics for her own good!” Anila and Padmasena were in their office canteen having lunch and discussing about a colleague who had joined that very day. The girl was not merely beautiful; she was, in the words of Padmasena, feminine grace personified! Of Padmasena’s many irritable habits, the one that exasperated Anila the most, was her proclivity to praise people who caught her fancy in an exaggerated manner. But Anila could not laugh at Padmasena because there was something akin to unalloyed earnestness in almost everything she said which no one could be dismissive about, at least not on her face . Besides, the girl they were discussing about was actually very beautiful. Her name was Janvi and on her first day at work at the Düsseldorf Publishers, where she joined like Anila and Padmasena as an editor, she had been till lunch neither too gregarious nor utterly taciturn. “Hi!” she had said to them with a polite smile, “ I am Janvi and I am a Mumbaikar.” At lunch when Padmasena, unsociable and mostly solitary herself, asked her if she wanted to join them at the cafeteria, Janvi smiled politely again and said, “Ah, thanks. But I have brought my lunch from home. Remember, I told you I hail from the city.” At that moment, Janvi’s mobile phone began to ring and saying a succinct, “Please excuse me!” to Padmasena and Anila, she started to talk over the phone in a low voice, while they left for the cafeteria.
Anila was not too fond of her room-mate Padmasena-eccentric, incorrigibly idealistic and incapable of accepting or rejecting anything without critically analyzing it. She was self-avowedly in love with Philosophy and literary philosophers and once when she said that she could not have an extra helping of boiled vegetables because she felt that she was becoming gluttonous, Anila had wanted to hurl invectives at her of the worst kind. Presently, they reached the canteen and Anila was about to place an order when her companion said, “ Janvi is so well attired. Her trousers and blouse are both so classy.”
“Hmmm, yes,” Anila was laconic in her reply as she did not wish to afford to Padmasena another opportunity to begin singing paeans of their new colleague’s beauty. Then something happened that abated Padmasena’s excitement rather unexpectedly. Staring at the sky , she said, “The girl is too pretty to be single.” Within an iota of the next second, Padmasena blanched and flushed and her exceedingly expressive face looked woefully remorseful. Anyone unacquainted with Padmasena’s ways might have assumed that she has perhaps, suddenly fallen ill but Anila instantaneously figured that Padmasena looked so utterly guilt-ridden because she made a comment that was not based on ‘reasoning’ or ‘empirical evidence’.
It was one of those not-so-infrequent moments when the otherwise haughty and constantly philosophizing Padmasena was nervous; in an embarrassed tone, she diffidently asked, “ Do you plan to have dinner here in the canteen or at home?”
“Well, let me finish my lunch first. I promise I shall start to ponder over your question as soon as I am done with it.” Anila retorted and continued eating Paratha while Padmasena morosely stared at her glass of fruit juice. When they returned to their office ten minutes later, they found Janvi eating her lunch that comprised of Rotis and what seemed like Alu-bhindi. Padmasena awkwardly asked her,” Hey! Your lunch looks inviting”
“Would you care to have some of it?” Janvi asked with her now familiar smile.
“No, no!” Padmasena cried out, nodding her head vehemently. “I mean thank you but I have to, I am afraid, decline your kind offer as I have just had lunch. I only wanted to say that your food, by the virtue of being home-cooked, looks very mouth-watering! Ammm…you said you live in Goregaon, right? Now since it takes close to two hours to travel from that locality to this part of the city by road, your mother probably had to wake up very early in the morning to make this for you. It must have been quite a lot of hard work for her.”
“I am not sure if it was much of a hard work for mom as it is I who made these stuff for myself and for the twelve other people who form my family.” Janvi replied nonchalantly and then turning to Anila, said, “ Hey Anila, in case you are not too full why don’t you try the alu-bhindi? I have been told I make this dish very well.” Anila walked past Padmasena to Janvi’s cubicle while Padmasena stood in the middle of the room, staring incredulously at the wall opposite. A good minute elapsed before she uttered, “Omigosh! You really cooked all these before coming to work? Do you do this every day? God! Did you-do you-wake up at dawn, then?”
“Yes, I do.” Janvi’s reply was laconic, too engrossed as she was in munching a popaddum to be interested in chatting with Padmasena.
“But how do manage to do so much? I wake up at 8 in the morning and have never cooked for anyone at all.” Padmasena almost supplicated Janvi to reveal an amazing secret.
“It’s no big deal, really. I have been cooking since I was thirteen and in fact, girls in ouf family are expected to start familiarizing themselves to cooking once they turn ten.” Janvi said with an air of-what seemed to Anila to be-studied insouciance and once again turned to Anila to ask, “When did you join this place?” “Oh, I will complete three months here day after tomorrow, on the 16th.” Anila replied sweetly and cast a glance at Padmasena. She still stood with her mouth agape and her eyes wide open, as if entranced. “Poor, little fool,” she thought of Padmasena and felt a little pity for her. “ Who ever gets astonished to know that a woman can cook at 24?”
III
I could hear Janvi and Anila converse but I was too amazed and suddenly, ashamed after I discovered that Janvi woke up at some freakishly early hour to cook for her entire family and she yet managed to come to work on time, dressed in an impeccable manner. Back at home, in the distant frontier town of Itanagar, I never do so much as to make the morning tea for the old, loving couple I have for my parents. I was overwhelmed with affection for ma who never asked me to do any household chores, guilt at my ineptitude and a faint admiration for the girl I just met. Choked with emotions and also confused by them, I slowly walked back to my seat. After all, I could not keep staring at the office holiday list, struck to the wall behind Janvi’s cubicle all day, could I?

On a game of Football!

(Written in imitation of the style Mr. Oliver Goldsmith employs in On Dress.)
It was a gloriously beautiful evening. The twilight of dusk had rendered the firmament kaleidoscopic-it was azure in the centre and saffron hued at the horizon. A balmy breeze blew, flocks of chirping birds flew over my head and at some distance away from the tree-lined avenue on which I ambled, on a lush field a group of young men were playing football.
It is a marvelous game undoubtedly though I cannot recall from my living memory, a single instance when I have kicked a ball. But the sight of men, single-mindedly running after the wonder that is this circular piece of inflated rubber which goes by the name of football, is ubiquitous enough. Being the kind of person who would, on reaching a picturesque Alpine village, be not as much bewitched by its beauty as much prone to reminiscing about Sherlock Holmes’ spine-chilling encounter with Moriarti in the outskirts of one such hamlet, I was naturally reminded by the vista of a game in progress, of the paragraph in English August, which described how young men playing football who most enthusiastically hollered for the ball, were usually the ones who secretly dreaded the occasion when the ball was actually kicked in their direction. Presently, however, I brushed aside my thoughts on the novel the protagonist of which I had misguidedly hero-worshipped as an adolescent.
I halted in my walk and watched the players, who were scattered all across the manicured ground but had their eyes set on the ball. Being no connoisseur of the sport, I could not infer if these men were playing well, these men in jerseys, but the keenness in their lineaments and the jauntiness in their strides, seemed to bespeak of their supreme, unalloyed devotion for the game. And suddenly, as quickly as the flash of lightning, it occurred to me how absolutely different did the sport render its players from me. While I was perplexed and aimless in my ramblings, these men literally had a goal to hit! They sweated for a purpose while I had none. I suddenly yearned to strike the football but it was too. The cerulean was now dark and a sepulcher for the day, another day, that had just died. Besides the men were utter strangers even though the silhouette of one them seemed in the waning light of vesper, a little winsome. But their game was coming to an end and I hurriedly resumed my promenade. I moved away from there but actually, did I? In the field that was desolate after the players dispersed, my desire must have still lingered-my desire to hit the goal!

On this New Year's Eve Night!

It was the last night of the year-dark, chilly and windy. She lay huddled on an uncomfortable, alien bed that she was sharing with two other people. Every now and then, she would sit up to cough; her face was red from repeated coughing and forehead was burning hot. The two people on her both sides cast anxious glances at her; they were worried about her deteriorating condition-one of them asked the other, ‘Do you think we could find a doctor in this unknown city if her fever aggravated later in the night?’ She was too exhausted from intermittent bouts of coughing to protest or to say anything to assuage their disquietude but she wanted to do both.
And to tell them how wonderful the night was for her-she was sleeping with her parents, or rather in between them, for the first time in twenty years or so. She was reading Shosha for the first time in three years. To be ensconced in between a couple she loved the most and to have for company, another couple she related with the most, was a dream which she never dreamt without feeling like Amelie the next morning-ready to embrace the world with all the tender affection of her heart. Every muscle in her body was aching and throat was so sore that she felt as if a thorn had been struck somewhere along her gullet. Traveling from Ahmedabad to Mount Abu to Udaipur in the span of a single day had taken its toll on her, her mother had concluded. But she did not mind the pain, the fever or the exhaustion. She was in a state of bliss, reading Shosha, while her parents fussed over her. Her father wanted to go the other room in the hotel where her brother was sleeping alone but she begged him to stay back. And she pondered.
Shosha’s love for her Aaron was selfless-she was too simple to comprehend his personal perversions and his intellectual disappointments or ever to have any expectations from him; Aaron Greidinger, the philosopher-playwright, was too fatalistic to not to be aware of the impending doom that awaited him and his fellow men in the form of the Holocaust or to have any expectations from his illiterate, ‘infantile’ sweetheart but they still loved each other, fearing no dictator, no political turmoil or penury.
And she loved her parents just as much. She realized that just as Aaron and Shosha could be themselves only in each other’s company, she could be herself-she who felt no anguish, no hatred, no envy, no discomfort-only in their presence. That did not make her love for them exactly selfless, she reasoned this out in her febrile condition. It is, however, an exquisite state of being, she told herself as she dozed off to sleep. She knew that on this new year’s eve night, she would dream that she is announcing to her parents that she has written her first book called Shosha Revisited. Too fanciful a dream it is, she heard a voice within her as she entered slumberland. But another voice replied, ‘But it is a beautiful dream, a beautiful night, a beautiful state that would last only until the day breaks in!’