Howrah Express

 

Sometimes, I feel I should capture my thoughts. Rather, be able to capture my thoughts as they form. By the time I can find a pen or figure out a tool to type in, they vanish like mist.

I’ve been feeling, not thinking, about disconnect. Like, even when I am having a conversation with someone, they say something to me and I feel something about it and respond. Their own feelings might be entirely different. And therefore, their own responses will carry a different perspective, a different tone too, perhaps, than mine would. Journeys too, sometimes evoke envy, sometimes just joy, and sometimes, a certain wistfulness about it.

In a span of a few seconds, I am hit by a curious mix of memory, feeling, pervading nostalgia, and nausea, discomfort of sitting hunched on the top berth of a 2nd class sleeper on a hot afternoon in May when the train was hurtling through landscapes I could not see, because all the shutters were down, the awe of seeing a sunrise from the train window, one day over a vast expanse of fields and another over a never ending row of trees, sometimes, the train would curve and I’d wish the window bars were further out so I could see and be fascinated. Because a friend is travelling by train. I’m feeling all of this and reliving snippets from memory. Of all my teenage train crushes, the first man I fell for, and kept staring at, and who kept staring back at me, for a whole day, and inspired several of my sappy first attempts at poetry. How the idea of love makes a fool out of me! Every damn time. And then Euphoria came out with Maeri. Palash Sen in a train, and I found the female lead so annoying! Kaun train ke darwazay ke paas khade ho kar, cute banday se eye contact bana kar brush karta hai yaar! How utterly gross!

And then all the delays, sometimes 4-5 hours, sometimes more, the enormousness of Howrah. The fascination of seeing so many yellow taxis, quintessential to Calcutta. There were no taxis in Ahmedabad. Reaching Hind Motor, the smells of that gully near the station, the smokiness muffling the gutter stench and carrying faint aromas of samoas frying, chai boiling, and slow moving. The journey long over, but the body still feeling the slight rocking motion of still being in the train.

I learnt to make a plait, braiding my mother’s long hair on a train. I would dread the time she would remember to ask me to recite the multiplication tables and I would hope that she forgets. I would wait for the chanajor, kheera, guava wala, they’d cut the fruit and add a generous amount of salt and red chili powder to it. Those were the most delicious cucumbers I ate. The chanajor with a mix of finely cut tomatoes, onions, coriander, chaat masala, and a dash of nimbu. It would burn my tongue but god, was it delicious! Mummy would let me have a little bit, dusting the spices off. She was a spice-slaying goddess for me.

Someone in the next compartment would being a round of Antakshari, and I’d be dying to join in but wouldn’t. I’d peep in sometimes, I’d look from the cage-like grill on the top berth sometimes. I would hope and wish we were a large group travelling because that would be infinitely more fun. And sometimes, well, all the time, there would be unwelcome passangers travelling without a ticket, sometimes with a child whom I’d hate for having to fight for the window seat. I would wonder which station they’d get off on. I’d hate being squeezed into a tiny space because 5 were sitting on the berth meant for 3. Afternoon siestas on the middle berth, the very act of setting up that berth – a wonder inspiring ritual. Getting the full seat for myself – a rare blessing. Somehow, the berth always had enough space for both mummy and me. The first time my tooth came off, was in a train. I learnt the concept of milk teeth and permanent teeth, and the idea of temporariness and permanence, in the Howrah Express.

Come evening, the big, rectangular, aluminium tiffin would open and dal-ki-poodi would be brought out, some ker-saangri to go with it, disposable plates, water from the thermos, and the wait for Kharagpur with its longest platform, confirming that we’re indeed close to nani’s house. Now there will be no more delays.

When you’re hurtling at whatever speeds your average Indian express train hurtles at, this is the sort of a view in store for you 

Serampore

February was like bittersweet chocolate.

And I love that kind. I do. It took me, very briefly, to Serampore, and it made me realize, how much I want to spend months in Calcutta and its suburbs, not necessarily photographing its streets, people, food, and leftover colonial architecture, but absorbing the smells, sights, and sounds, the distinct rubber horn of the rickshaw, the smoky morning smell of shinghada and shondesh, mingling with dhup from the multitude of temples, the frequent clear tone of the conch-shell, the aalaap mixed with the harmonium wafting from homes in streets too narrow for bicycles, through which bicycles pass anyway.

These aren’t the best of pictures of that gorgeous place, but they mean the world to me. The contain within them, a beautiful day that I spent on the streets of Serampore feeling like Alice in Wonderland.

I hope to go there again someday, and wander some more.

Hyacinth

Do you see them, in hundreds?
Dancing to the river’s music
The breeze carried.

Do you see the forevers etched
in their veins?
To be dead tomorrow.

Mr Natwarlal

An AMTS bus playing Bollywood hits from 1990s. A philosophy-spouting bus-driver, and a Shakespeare-and-Girish Karnad-quoting bus-conductor, named Mr. Natwarlal.

7:50 pm. November 23, 2015. Ahmedabad.

For nearly the entire duration of the 20 minute journey home, I felt I might be hallucinating. I’d begun to see Mario Miranda caricatures all around me, colours brighter than they were, features more exaggerated than they were. It might all have been easier to explain if I was actually hallucinating. Only, I wasn’t.

It was a chance ride in a city transport bus after a late wrap of work. Autorickshaws were scarce, and I was keen on feeling more like a responsible citizen using public transport instead of adding to the chaos that is Ahmedabad’s traffic. So what if it was just for 20 minutes! The interaction I had with the conductor, Mr. Natwarlal, left me amazed, and wishing to meet more people around me. Or at the very least, to share a snippet of the very interesting people who appear in my life.

Mr. Natwarlal holds a Master’s degree in English Literature, and Othello is his favourite literary ceration. And he fondly remembers Mr. Hasan, who headed the English Department at L D Arts College, in Ahmedabad, as the greatest professor to teach English Literature. (With due apologies to Mr. Hasan, I believe Dr. SherryChand to be a mile ahead.) But, I digress.

Mr. Natwarlal is a bus-conductor due to fate or choice, I don’t know which. But he shares a good rapport with all the regular commuters on his bus. Sometimes, he meets a nagging kind of a commuter who tries to negotiate on the fare. Sometimes, he meets an adventurous firang who is trying to find her way in a strange city. Sometimes, the bus is too crowded, even during non-rush hours. Mostly it is not, and these days, it is rather pleasant in the evenings. He does wish he had the time to read more.

If you wish to meet him, catch a bus ride in an AMTS Route # 400, at about 7:50 from Gurukul. If you meet a smartly dressed, bespectacled gentleman, with a good humoured, kindly look, you’ll know it’s him.

Gwalior Days

Indian Summer, is usually not half as beautiful as the song in its name. And it is often the perfect recipe for mirages, even hallucinations. It is infamous, in the villages and small towns of India, for making people lose sanity.

Everybody I saw on the streets that day, had a white cloth wrapped around their faces. 25 minutes of a tuk-tuk ride, in over 45 degrees celcius temperatures later, I had begun to imagine double barreled rifles slung across their shoulders, as if they were bandits, all of them. The hot wind, or lu, as it is called here, came in gusts, slapping me awake. In my mind, I pictured the train, its cool railing that I found hard to let go of, as I stepped into the hot Gwalior morning.

I could’ve slept all the way to Bhopal. I was tired in my bones. I wanted to be home already, and I had 4 more days of work ahead. The day seemed interminable. It was almost 7:30 in the evening when I wrapped the day’s shoot. My hosts asked me to stay for dinner after work. I needed to shut my eyes until tomorrow. I wasn’t looking forward to the long drive back to the mess, the lime walls still hot from the day’s sun.

I was surprised to see the lights on in my room. Did I leave them on? I couldn’t be sure. There was nobody in, the room was locked. And cool, as if the air conditioner had only just been turned off. A glass of lemonade sat on the side table, the cubes of ice in it, just melting. Could I smell his cologne? No, it couldn’t be. He couldn’t. He shouldn’t be here. He kept insisting that he should come along, even if just for a day. I cursed myself for insisting that he rather not.

I was alone in my room, not a soul around. I walked out into the garden, nobody there either, except the mosquitoes that stung. The caretaker came looking, asked if I’d have dinner. I asked him about the lights, and the lemonade in my room. He answered that he had ‘instructions’, and was told of my tentative schedule.

The dinner with the freshly made phulkas being served to me, cleared my mind a little. I could even laugh at myself and my imagination. Of course he wasn’t here. I had a second helping of the plain vanilla ice-cream before turning in. I’d read a little before I hit the bed.

The fort walls looked beautiful, lit, against the inky sky. And Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s ‘Kaee Chaand Thay Sar-e-Aasmaan‘ seemed to compliment the setting. It seemed to be made to be read on such an evening, against the backdrop of such a fort’s walls.

He’d laugh at the romanticism.
And just like that I saw him smiling at me from outside the window. For a second, I froze. And then I ran to the lobby outside. He didn’t come. He wasn’t there in the garden either. The watchman hadn’t seen him, or anyone else. And the caretaker wasn’t even smiling anymore when he said that nobody else was there.

Coming back to my room, I was furious at the tricks my mind was playing at me. I was furious at myself for falling for those tricks. And yet, I could swear that someone had been in my room, just moments ago. The bed was warm where he sat. My book was on the side table now. I had left it on the study table. I hadn’t progressed so far as where the bookmark was now…

“Hai zulf e yaar halqa e zanjeer hoo ba hoo
Rakhti hai aankh sahar si taseer hoo ba hoo…”

I read, and reread the poem attributed to Wazir Khanum. I double and triple checked my room, for him. There was nobody anywhere. Not even at the window. I didn’t realise when I fell asleep. The room was really cold when I woke up, mumbling, clutching his shirt.

I didn’t remember waking up in the night, and taking it from my bag… In fact, I didn’t even remember packing it along with my things, yesterday.

It was impossible to sleep then. The sky was getting lighter, and I felt that a morning walk would be about the right thing to bring me back to my full senses.

The morning breeze was beautiful. And the fort walls looked like gold in the light of the rising sun. I returned to my room, its door ajar, and the caretaker scowling at me, muttering how careless I was. I saw the keys in my hand, and fresh from the walk, I remembered clearly this time, that I had locked the door when I went out. I panicked for my gear, but nothing was missing from my room. Except, his shirt. I looked everywhere for it. It was gone.

I was late getting ready for the shoot. My hosts had sent their car with the chauffeur to save me the trouble of travelling in the heat. I decided to pack my bags and check out as well. The previous night’s events had me out of my depths. I’d ask my hosts for a business hotel closer to the venue.

The chauffeur seemed to be in a hurry to leave there as soon as possible. Driving towards the city, he asked me why I chose to live in that run-down mess when there were so many nicer options available in the city. I told him my friend had made the arrangements for my stay, but I had checked out.

I quickly apprised my hosts about my unnerving experience the previous evening. They looked worried, and asked me about my friend who made the stay arrangements. They were shocked on learning his name.

Capt. Shivendra Singh Chauhan had died of injuries during an encounter with infiltrators near Budgam, last year. In fact, yesterday was exactly one year since his death. Gwalior was his home. Yes, it was him in our picture together…

But it couldn’t be.

I’d taken the picture just before starting for Gwalior. And that was the last day of June, 2014. The time stamp on the picture said March 2013.

It took me all of my will power to focus on the work at hand.
I managed to complete the assignment without disappointing my hosts.

I returned to Delhi, on the verge of a breakdown. It was July, and there was no sign of rain. The night air singed everything it touched. I wanted to ask him what was going on. But he didn’t reach the station to receive me. I was all nerves and I wanted to cry.

I reached home a full hour later. It was quiet like a December night. But I was too tired to feel fear. I opened our cupboard for a change of clothes, and I saw all his clothes were gone. Every one of them. All except a crisp white linen shirt, on a hanger. The one I’d woken up with, in Gwalior.

Φ

A Calcutta Story

When the haath rickshaa turned towards Dhaka patti, it felt, as if, for a long moment, that time was fluid and this moment suspended mid-air, waiting to drop into an ocean of other moments like this one. The momentary realisation atop that mobile throne, that here, humanity moves like one giant ocean wave, was all it took to break the spell that Bada Bazaar cast.

A not-too-quick halt at a relative’s and then onwards to bring Isar and Gaura home. The bazaar itself was a perpetual celebration of sorts. Everywhere you saw colour – bright, festive, happy. Thousands of Isar and Gaura dolls waiting, in hundreds of shops, to be taken home.

“Is that where you got this from?”, I asked her, handing her, what I thought was Isar, intact in his bride-groom glory; smelling like everything in Naani‘s cupboard did – a curious mix of lavender and well, of Naani; of everything sweet about my childhood.

And then, that phenomenon I’ve not understood yet – tears of joy – happened on my mother’s face. She hugged her new-found treasure.

Sixteen days. That’s how long it lasts – the Gangaur festival. And those sixteen days passed in a daze of laughter, songs, jokes about future-husbands, and all the finery – see this?

She handed me a stack of pictures from a metal trunk. The lack of colours of the photograph did not dull the happiness bursting through. It never ceases to amuse me to see my mother as a girl, a child. Here, singing with all her sisters, and here, meticulously dressing up her Isar and Gaura. She hummed and then her singing filled the empty house with a burst of sunshine

Isar ji to lyaaya bataasa,
Gaura bai karay tamaasa o raaj,
Mhey Isar thaari saalli chhyaañ

(a marwari song sung on the occasion of Gangaur, teasing Isar about Gaura’s tantrums.)

She was smiling now as she cleared all of Naani‘s sarees, she found a little potli with Gaura‘s jewels. She stood the dolls near the old dressing table and got busy decking Gaura up in all her finery.

“Didi, ukil babu aeshechhen“, (the lawyer’s here) Ramji informed her. Ramji was the 60-something-years old domestic help at Naani’s home. I wonder what would Naani think of the empty silence shrouding her bustling grihasti. With Naani gone for so many years and my uncles having decided they wouldn’t again live in that house, it fell to ma to clear it out before they proceeded to sell it.

“What would you do at the end of this fest then?” I asked her when she came back, carrying a big folder of the house-papers. With the last of the furniture gone, and the house cleared, it was time for us to leave Hindmotor, and Calcutta.

“A reluctant, teary, farewell, mostly, from the Howrah bridge”, she smiled. “It’s as hard as letting go of your daughter, when she’s all grown up, and would leave home. Like the time when you left…”

“Why, do you think, Naani would’ve saved these two?” I asked, afraid, as our taxi neared the newer, Vidyasagar Setu, that she’d stop that cab and bid farewell to these last remnants of her childhood too, as she had done with all the rest of Naani’s possessions – donating to some charity, or passing on to an eager cousin or neighbour.

“So I could see you living my childhood for me someday”, she said. And to my relief, and joy, we drove straight on.

I love you – II

You see the little crabs scuttling away – you’ve noticed how they always walk sideways? And it’s so magical the way they go gupp inside their little holes in the sand. I wonder if they’re dancing perhaps, and not walking. 

I like to see you in whites. Your linen pants rolled all the way up to your knees and your soft cotton shirt and the indulgent smile – like living inside this moment, in the now is all you know. I just want to run back to you and put my arms around your neck and rest my head on your shoulder while I wonder if it is the ocean smelling like you or you smelling like the ocean. 

I do this while you try and hold my hair back. The breeze is making them fly away in dementia. I do look nice with long hair. 

I want to collect some shells from over there, you let me go and watch. Perhaps you’re wondering what will I do with them. Perhaps I will forget all about them as soon as we’re home. 

We’ve tanned so much in these past few days, soaking up all the sunshine to keep winter away from our bones. I have a vague memory of times when I’d never want to go home from a vacation. I don’t know if it was me really. 

I know you will ask me tomorrow, tease me if I’m ready to go home. I just want you know, I’ve never been readier than this, to be home. 

Paper-Cut

Phone calls are so usual, unending silences fill them. Texting is now widely regarded as the best way to propagate misunderstanding. Yes, we had letters. Now we converse in dreams.

In a particularly strange dream last night, I found myself hovering over the sand, at the beach where we walked, wiping away all of my footprints on the path we walked. The ocean did nothing to help. You saw me and smiled; asked me how would I remove the imprints of my letters from your skin where you’d held them. I said I’ll tear up all the letters and you looked away angrily.

This morning, I woke up to find my fingers smarting, covered in paper-cuts.

Cliché

Yun na mil mujh se khafa ho jaisay
Saath chal, mauj-e-sabaa ho jaisay
[Meet me not in anger, beloved,
Walk with me, like the morning breeze walks with spring]

Φ

A Mehdi Hasan rendition of the famous, Ehsan Danish ghazal, playing from a vinyl record, whitewashed walls, indoor plants, a carved lamp-stand, with a shade to match its elegance, teapoys and corner tables covered in muted shades of formica, plain wooden shelves containing all our books – our, yes – we couldn’t have been more proud than if they were our children – well-mannered, quiet, dignified, you could never guess the energies each of them contained, and me – all of us wait for him to be back. He has never disappointed us. 6:30 pm for me, or 1830 hrs in his language, he is home; rather, his presence makes it home. Somehow, everything seems to don a smile, when he returns – even the plants. Sirius and Laila laze contentedly after welcoming him home with hugs and kisses as if he’s been gone a whole week! Though, it was my bright idea to bring the puppies home; when they mewed and I doubted about their being canines; they would always have the first claim on his affections, on him, always getting the first hugs.

He was like a schoolboy in a sense. Rattling off what happened over the day, at work, over chai, never sitting down, fiddling with the vinyls, before he went off to play squash, coming back just in time for dinner. A post dinner stroll for all four of us, and we’d retire to quietude, always with a book. Yet, never alone. He called from work, thrice, sometimes, four times a day, always careful to not disturb my classes. There weren’t any long drawn out conversations, except, him saying that he was thinking of me. I could only smile and quickly ask him if he had nothing else to do at work.

He came home for lunch in winters. 6:30 pm seemed so far away! I’d smile to myself, dreamy-eyed sometimes, hassled sometimes, that I always had to plan ahead, making sure lunch was kept ready by the time he came home from work, and I came back from school.

He didn’t say a word through lunch that day. I didn’t know what, but I knew some trouble was brewing. In the evening, he said, he’d be gone for a while. A while could mean anything upwards of a month. I would have to take care of myself, and be strong were his only instructions to me as he packed. Waking up, getting out of his embrace and the warmth of the bed that morning was probably the most difficult thing I’d done in my life till then. I was as much in love, and as nervous as I’d been on my first date with him. He promised to write when he could. Phone calls were a luxury not for young captains.

That day, Sirius and Laila let me have the last hug.

[Note: the translation of the opening lines of Ehsan Danish’s famous ghazal are my interpretation of it, not necessarily an exact, correct translation of the verse]

J’ai Oublié

When I wake up, I feel the soft quilt and the coating of warmth it layers onto my skin. The soles of my feet feel the cool floor, in the kitchen, the skin on my face feels the moist warmth of the steam as it rises off the boiling water, my tongue, tentatively feels the comfortably hot sweetness of the honey and the tang of lemon in my morning tea. The worn china cup, sits warm in my cupped palms.

My skin has a memory of its own.

There are sights and sounds and smells that have become a part of me; and there are some that I’ve forgotten. But my skin records its own version of my history. Between the wrinkles and loose folds of my skin lie memories of hands held, my waist carries the imprint of his rough fingers, the skin on my neck remembers the harsh brushing of his stubble-d chin. The soles of my feet remember resting in his palms.

J’ai oublié

I don’t remember what he looks like , or the colour of his eyes. But I remember what he felt like. Rough, like the sand in my clothes after a day at the beach. And surprisingly soft at his shoulder – just where I would rest my chin, at a little hollow, as if it was made to the size of my chin. I remember how the frown lines on his forehead smoothed away  under my fingers. I don’t see us anymore, sitting together, or looking at each other. But my skin would know him if it met him again.

∞

“Why does your skin shine there?”
“Where?”
“At the back of your hand”
“It must be proud of itself…” I said, and smiled teasingly at him. His thumb passed over it many times then.
“And the other scar, does that shine too?”
“No.”
He made me tell the stories of my scars over and over again.

His fingers stopped wandering the length of my spine, halting at the little dot-like depression.
“How did this land here?”
“That’s from a biopsy.”
And I launched into the tale of the painful night and how I ended up calling my doctor at 4 am. Not even halfway through the story, I noticed he’d slept, his unbelievably soft head resting on my arm. The skin on my arm remembers his face.

Over breakfast that Sunday, the last time that I saw him, we barely touched. We were too busy leaving.
That last day, he looked at me so intensely, I felt his eyes had touched my soul. é