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.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Friday, February 18, 2011
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 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...
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
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!
“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!
Saturday, February 12, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
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.
Saturday, February 05, 2011
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?
“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?
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
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!
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