Of books and writers

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and the sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.” 

~ Ernest Hemingway

It rained yesterday, a good, earthy summer rain. It has been raining now and then since the last couple of weeks - the first moody spells of the year that have washed away the lifeless, sun-baked stagnancy off one and all. I hope they'll wipe the dusty panes of my mind too, and let me see the world more clearly so that some calm can be restored in my writing/blogging hours.
And so, somewhere between waiting for it to pour while grumpily editing a convoluted manuscript and the echoing persuasions of "you should write more often" from friends and family, these strikingly illuminating words of Hemingway happened. They further took me down memory lane, to a good ten years back when I had to present a paper on Hemingway's short stories as part of the semester-end evaluation for our Modern American Literature course. As an ode to his bizarre, very shortly-written short stories (there are some that are barely a page long), the title of my paper chuckled, 'The Difficulties of Reading Hemingway'. Being someone who worshiped Hardy and Keats and tried to emulate their romanticism, I wasn't too enthusiastic then about his curbed expressions and economic usage of words. Literature meant to describe, to paint a world laced with words. I remember the awkward look of our professor, who was quite the proverbial taskmaster, when very emphatically I ended my talk with how the great writer of his times finally shot himself in the head. Yes, I was that thoroughly tired of his brilliance that apparently the whole world got, but me. In stark contrast, over the recent years, I'm amazed at the candour that I find in his writing. The very understated style that once annoyed me now astonishes me - the art of saying so much in just a handful of words. Not for nothing they say, you don't read a book once. As you grow, so does its world and the characters living inside it.

PS. My current reading stupour comes from Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul. A plot that skids between two completely different geographies - Istanbul and Arizona (peppered with bits of San Francisco as well) - and houses at least thirty characters of which about fifteen carry the narrative forward, it's a whirlwind of a read. At times I felt the urgent need of drawing a family tree so as to not lose track of who was where and when. But like I have said here before, the element that tugged at my heart amid this chaos was Istanbul - its charming cobbled streets, the call of the simit seller, the greedy seagulls hovering over a ferry on the Bosphorus, and the history that coats almost every building of the city. There lies the pull of the novel. So yes, go for the atmosphere and for a detailed critique of the general Turkish attitude toward the Armenian genocide.  

John Keats

New historians have always made me a little edgy, and this is yet another of those times.

John Keats. He has been my unwavering bright star, from the word go. Ever since the nightingale song, he has been my hero. As if his enchanting poetry wasn't all, there was Fanny Brawne and then, that untimely, miserable death. His name echoed a string of tragedies - deaths in the family, unrequited love, a consuming illness; everything that endeared him to a teenage heart then.
But then came this, and ever since the morning, after reading it at a rather deliberate confusing haste, and re-reading it later to register it all, in between flashes of denial and doubt, I have reached one conclusion: I still don't understand it. May be I don't want to.

True, a languorous, dreamy aura pervades his poetry, but that cannot necessarily justify a laudanum haze. Yes, if one looks with the intention of confirming him as an opium addict, his poetry is a deluge of visions, chockablock with reveries of 'drowsy numbness' and 'a life of Sensations rather than Thoughts'. But is poetry to be read and understood literally? Isn't that against the very grain of it? Moreover, what happened to the good old trap of intentional fallacy?
On the contrary, it is this very element of detachment from the pains of the physical world and the transportation to the higher realms of tranquility and aestheticism, that makes Keats so very memorable and different from the other Romantics. The world would be a rather dull place if not for his 'Poesy' - a strange, yet impressive combination of beauty and melancholy.

And so, the bright star shines on, steadfast as ever.

"Here lies one whose name was writ on water."

~ Keats, epitaph for himself

(Portrait of Keats by William Hilton.
Source: Wikipedia)

Rewriting, retelling

It rains this afternoon. It always does at this hour, when all is quiet and half of the day lies decaying, paving the way quietly for the other half. Searchingly, I run to the windows, for a glimpse of the rain-fattened sky, or may be a full-bodied, leafy tree to watch the drops do a dandy dance in the shaky caress of the drunken leaves. A rumble of thunderclap and I wake up from my wishful thoughts - my windows open to the neighbor's bedroom walls and my balcony offers only more concrete and broken vista. Devoid of any scenery, I make do with the familiar fragrance of wet earth that fills every corner of the house.

This obstruction in my rain-peeping brought back mellow memories of an always drenched place, when not so long before I would watch the rain drizzle on the dark pines from my patio that gave way to a magical peek of the cloud shrouded Cascades. All this, of course, seems to be a far fetched dream now or at best something like Coleridge's blurry fragment.
But this sudden burst of uncontrollable nostalgia surprises me. Was I not the one who would relentlessly complain of the sodding rains then? Was I not the one who would vent rain-soaked rants here, there and everywhere? How, then, did the once annoying rains become so dear today? Of course, I am moulding and mending the unpleasant bits of past to suit my precarious present. I am beautifying the once desolate, rain-beaten landscape into something romantic. And nostalgia is always romantic.

As luck always has her own way of mocking you, she couldn't have shoved a more appropriate read my way - The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Just a hundred and fifty pages, yet it manages to turn you round and round as if the whole time you were on a mean, never-ending roller coaster. Tony, the protagonist, takes us on a flashback journey, primarily a solipsistic one, where we meet his mates and their youthfully pretentious, philosophical takes on life. The plot thickens when the most "clever" of them, the Camus-quoting, always serious Adrian commits suicide. Justifying the title, Barnes makes sure we sense the end after a major twist, only to be further distracted by his unreliable narrator. Tony weaves people and plots from his foggy memoir that spans more than four decades, while all the time the reader sits on an edge doubting the selectivity of his memories. What we remember as the truth and what really is the truth are two very different things. With his patchwork of additions and subtractions, permutations and combinations, he finally arrives at the truth. One that could never be retold.

"How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly - to ourselves."

~ Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Eat, Pray, Love

"This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something."

~ Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

This was one confusing read for me, apart from the occasional nuggets of wisdom like in the above quoted lines. I swung between hatred and love and then sometimes it was just unadulterated disenchantment. Now before I plunge deeper into my regrets, I must confess of being somewhat of a literary snob. Almost a decade of studying and a year of teaching literature has done this to me. But I did stray many times and found pleasure being on the other side, my most favorite being Bridget Jones, for I could actually identify with so many of her blunders.
Coming back to Elizabeth Gilbert's journey, I finally fell prey to it despite the years of resistance, ever since its stellar release. The reason - having watched the movie Eat, Pray, Love for the second time recently, and being once again moved by Julia Robert's brilliant performance (when has she ever been dull?!). My other reason for picking it up - I hoped it would have a cure for my personal disillusionment with life at the present moment, and that I would get to mend certain aspects of my writhing and wringing world. But this was one of those rarest of times, when the film adaptation stirs you more than the book itself. May be it was the superficial tone or the effect of too many bad, needy jokes, but a large part of it felt like reading out of the diary of a troubled teenager often obsessing over something as trivial as her first pimple.

Having said that, no one can take away the writer's courage and faith for embarking upon this remarkable journey, both physically and spiritually. Kudos to her for learning the daunting Sanskrit scriptures and mastering the art of meditation, which, I am sure, many of us Hindus haven't dared to and probably never will. But I just failed to make a connection with her predicament, or to get inspired from her experiences. I even went back to Goodreads to check out a few more reviews and was relieved to find that nothing was wrong with me. Well, not here, at least.

And when I was too distracted by the overwhelming self-love in the book, I chose instead to stare at this Buddha bookmark and draw from the pool of serenity cascading from that eternally radiant face.

A little rain

Sometimes a small moment is big enough, and in more ways than one could possibly think of. With a significant chunk of our worlds throbbing in tiny capsules of the ever enticing internet, naturally this has something to do with my virtual existence. A few days back, I received an email from a long lost friend, a bond that was once formed in an online community over our love for a common Urdu poet, Gulzar. The subject of the email just read - 'You love poetry, you had told me once' - and the body contained nothing but yet another forgotten poem - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Rainy Day.
Now odd as it might seem, but there's this quirky, serendipitous destiny of mine when every time I am in search of that little something to stir me and can't figure out what it exactly is for the life of me, something like this happens. Someone from the ancient past, long washed away by the tides of time or just obscured by the unanswered ways of life, would make his/her way back into my life. And my day would be made, just like that, smooth and uncreased like a freshly made bed.

Having nothing more to write but much to mule after, I would leave this poignant, heart-tugging poem for you. Since it's raining (it always does, isn't it?!) for more or less everyone, be it the literal or the metaphorical shower, I hope this would be a good, invigorating read.

"Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
   Some days must be dark and dreary."

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Rainy Day

Because sometime in the 'mouldering Past', in a little pastoral corner of Virginia, it looked like this after an unexpected midsummer shower.

To June

Somewhere between e-shopping for hair dryer and applying for a job in publishing, this struck me. That we are almost through half the year. That we have lived half the share of our boons and banes for this year. That come what may, one has to pull oneself through the rest of the other half for yet another hopeful whole. Interestingly, while the end of June marks the beginning of summer in the Western hemisphere, for us, the Easterners it means the end of summer. End or beginning, this is precisely the time when both the worlds are decked up in that lush, blinding green.

So while oscillating between both the searches, one materialistic and the other absolutely abstract, I embarked upon yet another search - a good June poem. And this is where it led me, The Guardian, the station where every art/book lover's search ends. I am sure many of you stop by here to catch a review or just stir those sleepy morning grey cells. Although moved by the many beautiful but mostly long forgotten poems recommended in the article, I however chose to stand by my old favorite - Neruda. 

"Green was the silence, wet was the light
the month of June trembled like a butterfly."

~ Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

And since I couldn't find any butterflies for you in this concrete jungle, I believe my Ma's most lovingly tended and Bapa's most photographed object, the football lily (that's what we call them here) would do. A lovely coexistence, isn't it?! That's how the two have traveled through the years and today completes the thirty-first year of their journey. To June and to togetherness then! 

Monsoon and after

It has arrived, the monsoon, and with what frenzy. With the temperatures taking a huge plunge from the maddening 40Cs to the refreshing 20Cs and the city washed off its accumulated dust and summer sins, everything sparkles in a nascent, green light. A huge, huge sigh of relief it is. This much-awaited and welcome change has also brought some odd guests along - waterlogged roads, traffic delays and the most annoying of all, the common cold. It has been raining achoos all over and in my case, it is accompanied by a horrible sore throat as well. Home delivered pizza, lazily boiled soup and ginger-clove tea is what I have been living on for the past two days.

There is also the old, trusted cure of books, the very smell and feel of them and Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha it is this time. Devoid of chronology or coherence (and sometimes sense too), initially all one gets is the feel of listening to a little boy ramble on about his adventures with his friends. But then slowly it grows on you, this beautiful chaos, and flashback by flashback you get it all. Ten-year old Paddy's colloquial, naive first-person narration, the abusive relationship between the parents, and the reader's humored confusion, all remind me of Francie Brady's life in The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe (a must-read, by the way).

For some reason, I have always enjoyed Irish literature, its characters in particular and the resigned manner in which they go about their lives. There's a subtle yet sublime stoicism in them that I admire, one that caters to my present sour mood quite well.

A word about the pictures in this post:

Unable to lug the gigantic SLR around in this weather and my cold-ridden state, I finally tried my hands at Instagram, and viola! I am absolutely in love with the fact that one could just work wonders with one's mobile phone. Now the very hip and happening Urban Dictionary defines Instagram as - "Every hipster's favorite way to make it look like they take really classy pictures when really they are still using their phones. Yeah, you might really look cute/old school/vintage/retro, but it's still a cell phone picture."
Whatever the purists might say, I am all for this instant fun. What say you all?

A day in Austen's Bath

Sprawled on the bed like a complacent cat, I soak up the elusive winter sun, one that shows up after a week long snow and icy rain. The humdrum buzz of a late Sunday afternoon drones around. I like how the sun rays peep from the window blinds and create a pleasing pattern of light and shade. And thus I continue with my recent bout of Austen comfort; both the books and the movies as well. A bit of Austenite, I am.

"I'm half agony, half hope", sighs Captain Wentworth from the heart-tugging pages of Persuasion. No particular reason for the choice but the autumnal Jane Austen just suits best to my current brooding, wintry mood. So I scour the murky lanes of my mind and lose myself  in the grandeur of Austen's Bath.

I tread carefully in my fine muslin gown, for it is muddy at this time of the year; what if the dainty lace gets all slushy and ruined. Oh and the dear, dear paisleys! How they cheer me while a gush of wind threatens to sweep away my bonnet. I pass through a thronging crowd of red coats; I try to spot that familiar, agreeable face. Just then a carriage drives past me in the most uproarious of hurries. Naturally, what follows is an utter embarrassment of confusion and a rampant exchange of hands and fabrics. Oh, but I did carry the parasol in a very lady-like manner.
I wander along the Georgian wonder of the Royal Crescent, dash in and out of the enticing lace and muslin stores, sip tea in the Pump room. Ah, the quintessential Englishness!

Season's first

Snow! Yes, our part of the city received a very generous amount of the pristine, powdery sheen over the weekend. Just when I was beginning to worry if we would have to go back to India empty-handed, without a chance to watch the familiar soft white fluffs blanket the stubborn, wintry ground. But there it was, magical and eternal like every other first. It felt new despite our two rather harsh winters spent in the East Coast. It was welcoming even if the slushy roads were not. And it was heartwarming, in a very childlike cluelessness, in spite of the plunging temperatures and the ticklish chattering of the teeth trying to spell brrrr!!

This morning as I stood on the patio shivering, enjoying the Narnia-like landscape, it felt fantastically surreal. Like a vintage oil painting, the scene reminded me of James Joyce's 'The Dead' from Dubliners. A man who has just learnt of his wife's romantic past is shaken by the suddenness and the intensity of the moment - that her dead lover is perhaps more alive to her than her emotionally frigid husband ever could be. He contemplates this ugly truth standing by the window watching the snow fall quietly, while a slow but heady storm wells up inside him. This passage is perhaps one of the most poignant piece of writings that literature has ever seen where Joyce, the master storyteller shines throughout.

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” 

~ James Joyce, 'The Dead'

Across the bridge

Every time I drive over this bridge that spans the breadth and captivating beauty of Lake Washington, I feel no less than a seagull. My spirits soar high over the sparkling sapphire waters as I head toward the neatly arranged concrete jungle of downtown. Today was another such day and a bright, sunny one too. 

Across the bridge awaited the happy coincidence of a conference and meeting an old friend after years, six to be precise. Armed with coffee and nostalgia, we took a walk down the good old university days - crazy professors, major Modern American Literature mishaps (we both got terrible grades there!), old crushes, tracing friends who aren't in Facebook... It was a celebration of sorts! 

Then came the time to hear the great Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak speak. A name that we academicians have been sweating and fretting over for years, ever since we have stepped into the abstruse waters of postcolonialism. This was my very first opportunity to see her and be in the same room as her, instead of just hearing the intimidating name that so often surfaces in the realm of world literature today. It felt truly overwhelming, although halfway through the lecture I began browsing my iphone to read about Spivak's celebrityhood. People do have this tendency to meander away during such longish talks, don't they?! Luckily, I found another person doodling away to glory and that comfortably numbed my guilt of not paying enough attention.

What began as a South Asian Literary day on the other side of the bridge ended befittingly with a scrumptious Thai dinner across this side. My stuffed head and empty, growling stomach couldn't have asked for anything more rewarding. And these mouthwatering lobster potstickers were just the starters! 

No more walls

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."

~ Anais Nin

Spring Renaissance

"My heart that was rapt away by the wild cherry blossoms - will it return to my body when they scatter?" ~ Kotomichi

"Spring? And now?", will be probably your first question. I know it is quite late into the year for celebrating cherry blossoms, particularly when the leaves are about to turn and set the earth's canvas ablaze in fiery, feisty hues. But what the heck, there's no time for spring! We carry it in our hearts all the time, don't we? When happiness is perched on green leafy branches, oozing with the fragrance of love and joy... When long forgotten emotions waltz through the air and bring back a basket of ethereal moments... When that sudden realization of being alive stirs up a little throbbing storm inside... When dormant hopes rise up from their dank beds to bathe you in sunshine and desire...

So, disobeying chronology and upsetting nature's scrapbook, I thought of talking cherry blossoms today. Cherry blossoms and their revival in me.

Back in the real spring, I had come across an achingly beautiful quote by the eighteenth century Japanese author Kotomichi, which I had fallen in love with the moment I had read it. How it couldn't make its way into this blog I do not remember, for it had touched me a great deal. The coming together of the fairy-like delicate cherry blossoms and the transience of human happiness in the lines is beyond poignancy. And so I want to preserve it somewhere here, which has become a sketchy memoir of sorts. This further led me meandering to one of the most popular and oft cited poems of Modern American Literature - In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound. Taking birth from intense emotions and composed of a handful of just fourteen words, the poem is Imagism at its best. To do justice to the renewal of spring, I married off these beautiful lines with some photos that I had clicked earlier this spring. And what gorgeous couples they make!

"The apparitions of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough."

~ Ezra Pound

Books that make you think

There are books that make you think, and there are books that make you think till it starts to hurt and open wounds unknown to you before. Plagued by images and insomnia, I cannot help being pensive about the fabricated yet mind-numbingly real worlds of Ian McEwan's Atonement and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. The power of good books being such, I am in a mood of denial. Of the reality. Of the world around me that whirls like a possessed dervish. Of my own meaningless existence. Thanks to my wise enrollment in the Contemporary British Fiction course from the University of Oxford, without which I probably wouldn't have been introduced to such achingly beautiful reads. And I see the world with a new pair of hollow eyes - hollow, because they've emptied themselves of the pestering wants. At least for now. Let the eyes be.

Atonement, Ian McEwan

It is an unusually hot English summer of the 1930s. The looming inertia and ugly stoniness of the Tallis estate lend character to the mounting sultriness. A thirteen year old Briony Tallis is like any other child at her age - curious, immature and impatient to understand the complicated world of adults. Harbouring a feverish passion for a literary career, she loves imagining stories and giving them shape with words whose paramount importance is the moral they convey. Amidst the clutter of her castles in air, lies her twisted reality - an absent father, a detached mother, a philandering elder brother (Leon), and a confused elder sister (Cecilia). Then there are the visitors - the cousins from the north, Lola and her twin brothers, who must stay with the Tallises till 'the Parents' sort out the nasty business of divorce; and Paul Marshall, a foppish rich friend of Leon's.

Despite the smothering heat, silence and hushed up family secrets, blossoms a surprising romance between Cecila and Robbie, the charlady's son who has been friends with the Tallis children since forever. With so much oh her platter and an imagination that already runs wild even when leashed, Briony weaves truths of her own. And when she stumbles upon her sister and Robbie caught up in a passionate moment which is ominously followed by Lola's rape, Briony cannot wait to give a conquering pattern to her story. Seizing the moment and impatient to cross the threshold of childhood, Briony's prejudiced testimony sends the wrong man to prison. Sixty years later, a famous writer, she writes a novel to atone for that one sin - to rectify her mistakes via her characters and give them another chance. Is she forgiven? On the canvas of a dysfunctional family, British class system and World War II, McEwan paints a haunting picture of love, longing and loss.

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

Nestled in the picturesque English countryside is the prestigious school of Hailsham, where the students are exceptionally well taken care of - weekly medical check-ups, no unhealthy teenage habits and an abnormal emphasis on art and poetry by the 'guardians' (yes, not teachers). This is the story of Kathy, Ruth and Tommy - three best friends who grow up together in this idyllic setting and fall into the ruts of the inevitable love triangle. Through Kathy's take-me-with-you narration, we at once become a part of their cloistered, yet happy lives. Almost after you are there, drawn in by her nostalgia, you wonder why these children are never let out? Who and where are there parents? Why this almost fetish-like obsession with health? And then, amidst flickering flashes of fear and discovery, it strikes you on the face - they are clones who are being reared in isolation and are perfected for their future as 'donors'. Their lives are mapped out even before they are created. But what is surprising and heartbreaking at the same time is how normal these children are - they fight and fuss, they listen to music and draw pictures, they fall in love - everything that the ordinary humans do.

Once they are adults they begin donating their organs till they just 'complete' (that's the word). Then there are the nurse-like 'carers' who take care of the donors during and after their extraction surgeries. All the while we keep asking - why this mute resignation to a horrible fate? Why the lack of rebellion? Riddled with euphemisms and a compelling narration that resembles a teenager's diary, Ishiguro slowly but steadily pushes us to an edge from where there is no escape. Dancing on tumultuous undercurrents the narration sails through friendship, love and sacrifice. And all this while death is just out there, lurking around the corner like a giant phantom beast. What option does one have on the face of absolute powerlessness? To go on living and loving, or to just wait for it?

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...

The changing portrait

I remember being mighty impressed with, and therefore pensive after having read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Had it not been for a seminar on Victorian Literature, I doubt if I would have ever cared to dissect this Gothic classic. Some of my classmates had found it quite creepy and I would not dare to disagree with them having found it somewhat disquieting myself. For my friends who haven't chanced upon this Wildean fare, here is a handy little summary of the novel. The protagonist, Dorian Gray, is an elegant and handsome young man who in time grows conscious of his charismatic influence on others. His exposure to high society makes him extremely narcissistic and hedonistic in his approach to life. The major motif, as the story unfolds, is a portrait of Dorian done by his artist friend Basil, which has a striking likeness to the real Dorian. Dorian cherishes his portrait above everything else as it portrays him in his youthful best. He looks at this painting and wishes that it, rather than he, could grow old. He challenges time and nature by giving his soul away. His wish is fulfilled which leads him to a life of debauchery and duality. Each time Dorian sins the painting undergoes disfigurement exposing the hideous side of his soul. Thus Dorian's youth and beauty are preserved from the clutches of time. This intriguing tale would push me to the boundaries of my thoughts and there would be abstract questions swarming in my head. Does my soul have a face? If it does what colour is it? A blaring red or a pristine white or may be a soothing blue... What if there actually was such a portrait which could unveil our monstrousity each time we transgressed? Come to think of it, we all have a tinge of Dorian Gray inside us. The wish for eternal youth, that elusive elixir, we all have a secret yearning for it. How else does one explain the confusing isles of age-defying and wrinkle lift creams that are flooding the cosmetics market. It is only too normal for someone who is blessed with divine beauty to be obsessed with it. Gradually this self-love or self-obsession grows into a deeper shade called narcissism. There is a very thin line between self-obsession and narcissism. But while self-obsession is often tolerated and is perceived as a folly, narcissism is not because it is considered to be deviant and therefore a psychological disorder.

Such is human nature that to understand it completely would be a rare and remarkable feat. There are so many complex layers to it, as we live in so many worlds, both imaginary and real. Juggling between reality and charade, such is the ambiguity of life that sometimes we struggle in a phony garb of self-pretense which we are absolutely unaware of. I don't mean to draw any logical conclusion of Dorian's absurdities and self-preservation, because there is hardly any. It feels cathartic to indulge in such profundity and art, in any form, is the perfect way to fuel a soul searching trip. Go meet your soul, it is one of the best encounters ever.