Of Winds and Poets and Me

I have a confession. I wasn't always in love with Lord Byron. There was a time, brief though it was, when another poet ruled my heart and still comes a close second to Byron. Initially, there was something repulsive about Byron, what with his debauchery, his lusty affairs...the incest. All the things that would later make him fascinating were a bit much for a child. Okay, maybe I was still fascinating but in an icky way. I needed to be a little older (13? 14?) to swoon for Byron's dark moodiness.

But my first dead poetic crush was someone close to Byron, their lives intertwined. Yes, Shelley. I know, I know. He was a bit icky (open marriage anyone?) too but he did have that delicious renegade quality, the romance of the exile, the tangled life...and all by the time he was 26 when he drowned. Most tragic!

A few weeks ago the Bise was whipping around Geneva, pushing me from the back as I walked, tangling my hair into a bird's nest around me. And it started me thinking of all things wind-related.

How the wind becomes part of our literary selves? How we ascribe certain attributes to the winds we experience.

In my childhood in India, there was the loo (no...not a toilet). The loo is a hot, dry wind that blows during the height of summer in the Indo-Gangetic Plains. Rather than doubling my efforts, here is how I describe the loo in my novel The Burden of Foreknowledge (2007).

"When the loo blows, it brings with it the heat of the desert and its gritty sand, driving people indoors for refuge. I go out to feed our cows and it slithers up my nostrils until I choke. I gasp for breath trying to suck in the thin, super-heated air. It is as if a fiery serpent is trying to make its home inside me.

Just as I think I cannot bear it any more, I stumble back inside. The wind haunts us for days, whistling and whining like an angry, vengeful ghost. If I venture outside I wind a wet cloth around my head...."

But it was also the loo that made watermelons and melons ripen to perfect sweetness, as the dryness sucked out the excess water and concentrated the sugars. It makes Indian mangoes into the almost mythical fruit that they are.

In Switzerland, I encoutered the Bise, French for "a light kiss." Let me tell you, there is nothing light about it. It should be French for a "kick in the ass." It is fierce, is generally dry and attacks us from northern climes. The only upside is that it is accompanies blue, clear skies. It creates beautiful days but, as the loo can kill a human being through almost instant dehydration (within hours, even minutes), the Bise acts on the nervous system. How I don't know. It sounds pleasant but I need to research it some more.

Victor Hugo wrote a poem, Le Bise about it.
"Le bise le bruit d'un geant qui soupire;
La fenetre palpite et la port respire;
Le vent d'hiver glapit sous les tuile des toits;
Le feu fait a mon atre une pale dorure;

Le trou de ma serrure
Me souffle sur les doigts."

(Bad translation but here goes:
The Bise is a brutish giant who sighs
The window flutters and the harbor breathes
The winter wind yelps under the roof tiles
The fire has been guilding my atre (??) blade.

Through the hole of the lock
I feel the wind's breath on my fingers)



That's me 'enjoying' a windy evening by the lake. Freezing! Note the hair whipping around, the scrunched eyes, and the frantic waves on our usually calm lake.

We are also lucky(?) in Switzerland to sometimes be treated to the Mistral, arguably the wind with the most beautiful name. Isn't it a lovely name for a girl? The Mistral too is strong, cold and usually dry and passes through the Rhone valleys. It can cause Mediterranean storms. In the Provencal Christmas crib there is usually always a shepherd who holds his hat, his cloak billowing around him because of the Mistral. Sadly, but appropriately, a French missile has been named Mistral.

Interesting isn't it, that we are rarely moved by gentle breezes. Winds are elemental. They create weather systems and born because of them. They have well-worn paths and we can trace the seasons through the winds that are part of our lives.

And, why was it, when I lived in the land of the hot loo, when we looked forward to winter for relief from summer, that the one poem I loved was about a wind. Yes, for it was his lovely Ode to the West Wing that made me fall in love with Shelley. It's a little bit dark, even macabre, it's fanciful, it talks about the power of the wind, its twin roles as destroyer and preserver, and touches on the circle of seasons and that of life. It leaves the reader with hope. Here it is:

Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1803-1882)

I
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: 0 thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave,until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!

II

Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like Earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O hear!

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Connections and Jet Trails

A few days ago I got a facebook email from someone I hadn't seen in over 20 years. A friend. An old friend...from school, perhaps starting from 8th or 9th grade. I remember her still...slender, two long braids (yes, hair could not be left loose in most Indian schools), her uniform dark blue skirt just grazing her knees, white shirt buttoned up all the way, black shoes, white....really white socks.

I emailed her back. A couple of days later I heard back from her. She was in Paris on her way to London for a vacation. I could have met up with her while she was still in France but it was already too late.

How fluid our lives have become, the lives of our generation? We move across borders as if boundaries don't exist. Vacations outside the country were a rarity when I was growing up. No longer. Living in India or the U.S. or Europe doesn't matter. We leave our homes traveling across, soaking up other countries, other cultures, then return to where we live.

Can we really call them homes any more? These places in which we live and cook and eat and love, and then leave.

Do you ever look up into the sky and see jet trails? They reminded me of giant fingernails scoring their way across the sky. Love marks. And now I wonder if perhaps, instead, they are the ephemeral traces of our lives that try to intersect but then slowly evaporate beneath the heat of our frantic and frenetic lives.

I wonder about these things sometimes.

Of numbers and rambles and memories

There are two sets of numbers in my mind. 2937 and 2560977. They're both conduits to the same place. An old, aging house in small-town India. When I think of the word 'phone' an image similar to this black, dial-up version comes to mind. None of the fancy-schamncy trimline, light plastic concoctions with touchpads and speed dials. This was a phone with heft that made me reflect that what made me hear voices from thousands of miles away was a testimony to the ingenuity of humankind. That it was a miracle.

2937 was changed to 2560977 a few years ago. I try to remember when but I can't. So it remains; a few years ago. This is how we lose links in the chains of our memories. Approximations that blur out vibrancy so that the past exists in a colorwashed muted palette.

2937 was my phone number while I was growing up. Four digits. Nothing more. Simple. This was before the digital exchange in my small town. I used to be shocked at the long numbers of people in Delhi and Bombay, and even more so by the exotic numbers of Canadian and American relatives. And when I lived in smaller towns, sometimes you picked up the phone and asked the operator to connection you to some one or two or three digit phone number and I recall being proud of our four digits. No need for an operator. We were more advanced. So we were, in a no-mans land between a metropolis and a very small-town. We were a city, a small city. 2937 is a number I'll remember forever.

Life and living is like a fist-full of dry, powdery dust. One puff from a breath and it's gone, scattering in all directions, being absorbed into the environment, until it can no longer be distinguished.

But numbers are precise. I can think of 2937 and think of home. Home at 29 Kanpur Road. Always home, no matter where I go, and where I live. And what of this new number, this imposter under which 2937 still dwells? I forget it sometimes. I needed to look it up even when I called every weekend. But 2937 remains with me. But it no longer exists.

I have no other number to call so I dial the imposter. Impulses rush forward from my phone under all those thousands of miles of cables and wires and fiber-optics. Technology that shrinks the world, brings us closer together.

The strident ring of an Indian phone, none of those refined buzzing or muffled rings. This is a ring that demands attention, that compels a person to come running from the back verandah, to abandon guests in the drawing room, to come running from where a mighty tree once stood and now there is nothing.

It rings. And rings. No one picks up. There is no click, no hello. It rings. It will never be picked up. 2937 or 2560977, it doesn't matter. There's no one there. The house is there but not the home. The line disconnects and a voice tells me to check the number and dial again. There will never be anyone home again.

Food snobbishness

I am a bit of a food snob. There! I said it. I don't share the usual desi love for masala chai. Yuck! I like my tea very propah, brewed in a tea pot, milk and sugar served separately. Some might call it a slavish remanant of the raj. I just call it good tea. And civilized!

And I feel the same way about biryani...the snobbishness I mean. It might be unreasonable but many people cook biryani like pullao and call it biryani. Now I've only recently learned how to cook biryani from my sister who is the best biryani cook in my opinion. But even before that I knew you couldn't just make the curry and then boil the rice in it, somewhat similar to pullao (which is cooked in the meat broth) and call it biryani. Heresy!

The curry is cooked and thickened so it doesn't make the end result soggy and squishy. Each grain of rice needs to stand apart from the other. Then you boil the water until the rice is almost done...but not quite. Then you layer the rice with the thickened curry and simmer until it's done. No gooey biryani please.

It's a precise process, part science, part art...and totally delicious. And yes, no vegetables in the biryani. I am a Muslim biryani snob....no potatoes and peas in mine please. It's a meat and rice dish. Period!

And yes, no food coloring either. Gasp! Like a good paella a good biryani gets part of its color and its unique fragrance and subtle flavor from saffron. I dissolve mine in kewra water and that's when the biryani becomes what it is. Not an overtly spicy-hot dish but with layers of complex flavors, fragrance and appearance.

I miss wedding biryanis from Allahabad and Kanpur. Mine is a cheap imitation of a good imitation (my sister's recipe) but man those U.P. muslim wedding cooks, their biryani can make you weep. As do their salan and their kebabs. And the sheermal...just sweet enough and heavenly with a spicy wedding curry. And the naan, not the overly-white and soft naans from Indian restaurants, but the good stuff, slightly rough (whole wheat flour) and porous to soak up the spicy curries. I WANT SOME!

I need to get invited to a U.PMuslim wedding.

But until tha happens I am thrilled about my own quite decent, chaste and pure biryani. I just made a potfull yesterday and we've finished almost all of it already. Maybe there'll be some for dinner. Can't wait.

Fair and Lovely Accents

I've been wondering recently about accents. It's interesting to note that when we move to a place with a perceived cool accent (the U.K, even the U.S. and Australia) that accent is quickly incorporated.

Hey, I'm just wondering. Not that I've consciously inculcated (at least I don't think I have) it but I have a totally American accent (well the mid-western, less-accented version) myself so it's not like I am picking on others.

I know people who've moved to London and suddenly they sound like a Brit. But, on the other hand, I know others who've moved to Thailand or Kenya or Japan or Malaysia and they don't have the accent of the English-speakers of that country.

Curious!

I guess, in India, someone moving from a small town to Bombay or Delhi takes on that accent. Again, because it's cooler. It gets you more. Impresses people. Perhaps even impresses you, huh?

But then it's not really unconscious, is it? I remember when I was in university (many, many moons ago) in Allahabad. This girl went off to be seen or meet or whatever it's called, her husband-to-be who lived in the U.S.. She spent a few hours with him getting to know him (how do you do that?).

Anyway, she came back to class with a weird American accent. When someone asked her she retorted, "Well, if you spend time with someone it automatically has an effect. It just happens."

I wonder if her fiance went back to the U.S. with an Indian, Allahabadi accent. Probably not.

But what's at the root of this phenomenon? Is there something else, something beyond the it just happened/it's natural/it just is excuses. Is it just that we pick up something from where live? But, if it's that why is our unconscious selection so discriminating? Why an American accent but not a Mexican one?

We choose to take on accents from those whom we perceive as being somewhat superior (interestingly few moving to the UK start talking with a cockney accent, or with a Texas twang in the U.S.), better than us.

And we might spend years in a country with other English speakers, even if they are not the majority (as in India) and never seem to pick up that less "desirable" accent.

What makes a British accent sexy and proper? What makes us go weak in the knees when we hear an Australian drawl? What makes the way we pronounce our words, where we place emphases, how we break them up so fraught with shades of superiority/inferiority, and dare I say it--- racism? Is there some subtle racism at work here? Something subterranean, lurking under the surface?

Are accents the fair and lovely creams of the language world? Do we smear them on to escape the duskiness that is just a thin surface away?

There is nothing inherently sexy or proper or cool about any of this. We buy into the Western superiority argument. Is there really an argument? We just do it...without thinking what that says about the world we live in, about us and about those we choose to emulate and more importantly, and more importantly, those we choose not to emulate.

Shambhu the coffee-loving sweeper politician

"What you doing here now? Me want coffee in cup."

His breath coming in gasps, coughing in strangled spells of time, he would enter through the backdoor. He loved coffee, or really Nescafe. Milky and sweet, he would get it poured into his cup until the brim. Sometimes he asked for and got another cup.

I wondered why he brought his own cup...or rather an old, thick porcelain cup that was part of a long-depleted set that my mother had given him. After drinking his coffee he would wash it and stash it somewhere under the stairs that led from the indoor patio to the terrace. He would retrieve it for his next visit.

I asked about it but was gently told that since he spent his days cleaning toilets it was better if he drank from his designated cup. Better for who?

I wondered why he sat on the floor but somehow I knew not to ask.

All the servants sat on the floor, even if as a child I would ask them to sit on a chair or on the bed. Interestingly their children (some of whom I played with) and now their grandchildren had no problem lounging with me where I sat or lay.

But Shambhu was not even a servant. He was a dalit--a chamar I think-- and for him it seemed to be enough that we included him in our archaic 11 o'clock coffee ritual and that he could practice his broken English on us and we would talk with him.

But while for us he remained a jamaadar, outside he was also a railway employee (all railway sweepers moonlighted cleaning private toilets once they were made 'permanent' and were assured employment). And more importantly he was a politician. He was called 'netaji' and people would greet him with folded hands and give him a chair to sit on while they stood. He was head of a sweepers association and made speeches and apparently brought about some changes. I wonder if they got him coffee instead of 'chai' at these functions. Hhe was in the Hindi paper 'Dainik Jagaran,' with a garland of flowers around his neck, surrounded by people. He showed it to us.

Once while I was going somewhere, I saw three men walk up to him on the street, bow deeply with folded hands as he patted them on the back and talked with an authority I had not seen in him before.

He was severely asthmatic, an ailment he shared with my mother. So, in between talking about "the dogini give birth to puppies,' and 'I tell him, you listen here, I am neta of place not you. You go dafa from here mister,' they discussed their asthma.

"Begum sahib," he would commiserate in hindi, his face serious, "it is very difficult to breathe these days. You seem better."

"No, no, Shambhu, I had a bad attack a week ago but this Tedral is working. Did you get that inhaler I told you to get."

"Haan, this Ventolin," he said, taking it out of his pocket,"I use it but still this way of breathing. What can I do?"

"Are you using it correctly?"

He was not. My mother showed him how. But eventually all medications would stop working well for him. Perhaps it was his job, sweeping the railway platforms caked with Allahabad's prodigious dust and filth. Cleaning the flush toilets was not too bad but he also cleaned the receptacle-based toilets in some of the servants quarters. With a cloth tied around his nose and mouth, he would go in and retrieve their shit in an old bucket, the flies already swarming on early summer mornings. Mostly his wife, Kamala (also a moonlighting railway worker) would take care of these houses of the poor.

Each time he showed up, his breath whistled like a steam kettle, each word punctuated by painful pauses. Sometimes he was better, sometimes worse.

He died a few years ago. He was a postscript in our lives. I am sure, that the by now retired netaji, got more than a few accolades in his consitutency, and I am sure his wife, Kamala, and his children eventually went on with their lives.

I wonder what kind of death it was. Did he struggle to breathe till the end? Was there relief at the end, when he could finally give up the fight to bring air into his lungs? Did someone give him one last cup of coffee in the days leading up to his death.

Why am I thinking about him today?

Because I am my mother's daughter in at least this one thing. I am developing asthma. Today I am struggling to breathe. That lung thing I picked up in Cairo has morphed into a full-blown attack. The last time I had an attack was seven years ago so I guess I am luckier than my mother or Shambhu. I am on a course of Cortisone and some kind of inhaler but there is no positive change, after more than 3 days.

And each time I cough and cannot stop, each time I hear my breathing whistle in and out like a tortured banshee, and I hear my own voice sound strangled and weak, I can smell Nescafe and I can hear Shambhu.

It makes me wonder about him, think about him. The human mind is a selfish, self-obsesseed thing. At least mine is.

Jaya's cousin

Quite a few years when I had first sent in my story, Jaya, to chowk, I got an email from her cousin. Even though I had fictionalized the story quite a bit and had not used her last name, Jaya's cousin recognized her name. She was a scientist at CERN in Switzerland. We kept in touch for a while. Then we lost touch. I hate the fact that I don't even remember her name. Pratibha? Pratima? Last name? How elusive, this brain of mine. It can remember strange details (how a certain piece of rock looked exactly at some Circuit House when I was 8, the name of some little girl I sat next to in a bus years ago) but her name eludes me.

I was thinking of Jaya today...and then I thought of her cousin. On a related note, a few years ago I found a link to this old story of mine on some site in Germany (the rest of it is in German) and now I work for a German company. I am wandering.

So, here's a teaser from the story:

I was born at the darkest moment of the night. The time before the night lightens for the first glimmerings of dawn.
The time that is totally still, waiting...always. And now I drift here, in this darkness. A darkness that makes the hour of my birth seem like day. So thick, so impenetrable, so comfortable. Effortlessly, I turn in this womb of
death and I am happy. Happy? Just a word that I always wanted to really understand for so long. A goal never attained.

If you want to read more:

Here's a link to the German site: http://www.imn.htwk-leipzig.de/~bunk/mirror/jaya.htm

And here's the link to the slightly more edited version on chowk: http://www.chowk.com/show_article.cgi?aid=00000492&channel=gulberg

Is most of life about losing touch with people: through death and drifting? Or is it something we do...connecting with others in between the death and the drifting?