O Captain, my Captain!

(image courtesy: Pinterest)

It has been more than a week and the world's back to its usual, sad rounds. But some things take time to sink in. Even when you are far, far removed from its bleak actuality. You are still capable of feeling that ache, however feeble and tangential. You are still shaken, for days together, by the tragedy of it all. Such is how some people touch your lives. And he was one of them. 
  
Farewell, Robin Williams. Thank you for the laughs. And for that eternal twinkle in your now-happy, now-sad eyes. You'll be missed. Terribly.

Rilke answers...

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke has always made things a tad easy, breathable. Like the lucid laugh of a child. Like the gentle unfurling of a touch-me-not. Like that unnoticed fall of the last, rusting leaf. Expectations will nag, questions will pester, and yet life shall continue to unfold and happen. Day after day, year after year. Like it always has. 
For, to borrow the great poet once again to my rescue - "no feeling is final."

A very happy and happening weekend to you all. 

Grapes are sour

But most aren't. Or are they?

How does one live in pretense and not peep inside one's self, for once?
For how long could one continue wearing that tempting, deceitful blindfold?

Sure, that is the less complicated way to live. But till when?

Is it really that difficult to bare all to oneself? The flaws and the failures.

I'm no practitioner of denial. It is what it is. Life.

May be I'm no clever fox.

Dhobi Ghat - lights, camera, reality!

Last week we went for Dhobi Ghat, Kiran Rao's debut directorial baby, despite the not so encouraging reviews. For me, the one hour and forty minutes was spent well, enwrapped in a poetic meaningfulness. What could be more rewarding than watching four real people, made of the same blood and flesh as mine, battling the whims of a big bad world in search of a life? And not once did it feel like I was there for Aamir Khan. Not this time.

Yasmin, in her quest for happiness, introduces us to Bombay - the crowd; the incessant rains; the fast paced individualistic life; and finally the sea, that omniscient secret-keeper. In an eloquent narrative shift, these regular details of the city blend in and get lost in Yasmin's existential angst. Trapped in a lonely and loveless marriage, her only way of escape from reality are the videos that she records as letters for her kid brother.

Arun, an upscale artist who takes up Yasmin's old flat, discovers her video letters and some rusty keepsakes in a dusty corner of an almirah. Curious, he begins watching these videos with a regularity that can be compared to one's cup of morning tea. Divorced and reclusive, her naivety unhinges him in a haunting way, so much so that he wears her trinkets as one would wear one's faith. He is drawn into Yasmin's little world and begins emptying her essence onto his canvas in colours of hope. It is only when he watches her last video, a suicide letter, he is jolted out of the reverie.

Shai, an investment banker from New York stumbles her way into Bombay for some soul searching through her camera lens. She meets Arun at one of his exhibitions which culminates in an unexpected impulsive night. Time passes but Shai is unable to forget the moment and longs for the enigmatic artist. In such desperate times, she turns to Munna, the shy dhobi who aspires to become an actor. Together, they explore the city - he as her guide and she as his portfolio photographer.

Munna gradually falls in love with his Amriki mem, although he knows of her fixation with Arun. Worse, he knows the improbability of his own dreams. Besides the matters of heart, his closest friend, the only sense of family he has ever known, is murdered in a gang war which leaves him disillusioned with the "big city". He realises Bombay, with all its money and glamour, is heartless. Only lifeless skyscrapers can thrive in its cold bosom. Surely, this is not the place for fragile human hopes.

Dhobi Ghat is an experience, a myriad of emotions, a lyrical portrait of reality. How far can one push oneself for that tiny flickering ray of happiness? It tries to answer this one question that has been throbbing inside every man's heart and mind. And it will continue to do so forever.

In Ashima's shoes

"For being a foreigner Ashima is beginning to realise, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy - a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts."

~ Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

Seven winters back when I had first read The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri's heartrending tale, it had stirred and brewed a little storm inside me. Since then I have gone back to it, in chunks and bits, like a fate-worn lover who has to return to the memories, living and losing at the same time. The love affair continues, only this time I am one of them from the pages. Ashima - a demure Bengali woman born in Calcutta, brought up amidst a fierce sense of culture and draped in unpretentious tangail sarees. She marries Ashoke, an engineering student at MIT and accompanies him for a new life to America - "the land of opportunities".

Ashima's life in the States is shaped out of many realities - the regular calls to Fulton fish market in the hope of a lucky catch of rohu or ilish, the much dreaded driving lessons when she would cringe her face and push the accelerator uneasily which would result in a beeline of traffic honking impatiently behind her, the mounting vexation during the customer care calls when she has to spell every single alphabet of 'Ganguli' unfailingly and with examples. Prior to my life as a foreigner, this futile yet continuous search of one's identity and the reluctant unraveling of oneself to blend in, both physically and mentally, had not been this huge a part of me. Now I, too, am ashima - one who does not have boundaries - for one simply cannot afford any in the desperate confusion of the old and the new.

My solidarity with Ashima transgresses the boundaries of age and experience. A surge of tender pity grips me when anxious and alone in the final trimester of pregnancy she craves for jhaal muri (an East Indian snack of puffed rice and spices) and quite helplessly tosses chopped onions into a bowl of Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts. There was not much choice for an Indian's culinary comforts in the America of the 70s. Ashima's most intimidating task, more so because she wears her Indianness with aplomb, is to understand and accept the American ways of her children who are themselves trapped in a huge chasm of cultural mores. How much could one fight one's way out of the linguistic and cultural barriers back then?

Even after a good thirty years nothing much has changed. Foodwise, yes, a lot has. With the mushrooming of Indian grocery stores and restaurants in almost every corner of the States, pleasing one's taste buds isn't a questionable dream anymore. Also, what was once the struggle for existence has undergone a vast change over the last twenty years resulting in an unbecoming vanity fair. But the old haunting feeling of rootlessness sits still in the same dusty corner of the heart. Festivals come and go, seasons spring and fall, but the ache remains. I have been walking in Ashima's shoes for the past three years, across six states and on a multitude of roads. With each step the bite has become worse, fanning the sore of longing till the wound feels like a second skin. And thus another day breaks, impregnated with a perpetual unknown wait...

Aadatein bhi ajeeb hoti hein!

Saans lena bhi kaisi aadat hai

Jiye jaana bhi kya ravaayat hai

Koi aahat nahi badan mein kahin

Koi saya nahi hai aankhon mein

Paaon be-his hein, chalte jaate hein

Ek safar mein jo behta rehta hai

Kitne barson se kitne sadiyon se

Jiye jaate hein, jiye jaate hein...

Aadatein bhi ajeeb hoti hein!

~ Gulzar

Summer lessons

Our oldest mango tree back home, laden with beautiful blossoms

I'm back from my month long euphoria of mangoes and monsoons, with a bagful of memories. It was freakishly hot, there were too many errands that kept us on our toes throughout and ultimately viral fever marked the end of our woes. As I steered my way past prejudices and illness, a swarm of thoughts caught me unawares. Sam feels I've become the 'complaining type' and in my defense I can only say, it is not completely false. Could it be age catching up? Anyway, I shall jot down neatly, like a meticulous kid doing her holiday homework, life's lessons learnt during my Indian summer.

1. "Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't." Eleanor Roosevelt was right during her time and for the times to come as well. Do your bit and stop dreaming of the pretty laurel crown.

2. Never, ever kill these blessed days with bratty arguments with your parents. For once it is over it feels terrible. Also, it goes on to haunt you the most when you are thousands of feet up in the air watching your country recede into a vast blurry mass.

3. One cannot change the way people think, therefore it would be wise to change oneself. But again, wisdom has always been an elusive little elf with me.

4. Try to sense one's humour vein before dishing out yet another of your classic sarcasm coated jokes. Some people just don't have it in them.

My only possible means to wriggle out of such situations is to either rant and whine about my unfair share of luck in my diary or just blog out my flustered self or be a perfect nagging wife to Sam. Once I have found a cathartic vent, within moments my steely resolute self crumbles into airy nothingness. I could never make a good student of life's teachings. Baah!

And she continued searching...

Kya karen zindagi, isko hum jo mile
Isski jaan kha gayi raat din ke giley.
Raat din giley....

Yet another soul searching number from Gulzar saab in the latest Bollywood hit Kaminey. How many times has the man done it? Weaving poetry and sense from everyday words and scenes... Before I get too carried away with my Gulzar-mania, I must restrict myself to my purpose. Such ordinary lines (and here I go again) and there opens a window to our endless war with life about shattered dreams and thwarted desires. And why not? For one is yet to meet a man to have tread the earth who would say "I've got whatever I wanted from my life, I am actually happy." Why should the realisation of happiness be so difficult? The other day I was watching Woody Allen's recent Academy flavoured Vicky Christina Barcelona and as always it happens after watching a signature Allen film, I was left thinking, thinking hard this time. I was intrigued by the character of Christina who is a nonconformist and is introduced by the narrator with these lines -- "If you asked her what it was she was gambling her emotions on to win, she would not have been able to say. She continued searching... certain only, of what she didn't want." In real life, we all are Christinas, in one way or the other. We all share her predicament and are very sure of what we don't want. Miraculously, it is a cakewalk listing out the I-don't-wants in life. But who can define what is it that we actually want? Ah.. if only! Now there lies the real sting!

Again there's this universally acknowledged truth that when one part of our life flies high in the sunny blue skies, the other spectacularly crumbles to pieces with a loud thud. How often the 'all's well with life' is just a flicker of a moment! The moment when we realise we have all we need, the conviction is lost and so is the moment. Even Facebook has quizzes that have the brains to calculate how happy one is with one's life. Probably because we humans have always calculated it in the negative! Jokes aside, how demanding can it be to put aside the blame games and the complain conspiracies and be peacefully content with one's share? Of course, it is often convenient enough to hurl the nameless acquisitions at life and call it unfair, but isn't it time we learn to be a little at ease with ourselves? Definitely soul searching can be very enriching as an experience, but at times it is just wise to resist the alienation from reality. May be it's time to kick out the whining void of wants and let in some fresh air. Christina, go take a walk!

A summer rain

Pomegranate blossom in rain

The rain waltzes in with the august company of myriad hopes.

The oozing odour of the wet earth
unhinges my complete being.
I strip myself of the much accumulated worldliness
to partake in nature's pagan celebration.
My thoughts march ahead and rest on the rain drenched greenery.
Green... the harbinger of optimism!
Isn't rain cathartic?

I watch the quivering leaves flinch,
feverish with the weight of the promiscuous rain drops on them.
The droplets dangle precariously,
queued on the edge of the leaf,
as if to leave would mean the end of the world!
But, isn't life all about holding fast?
To someone, to something?

I can hear the rain seeping into my head.
I can feel my vision blur.