Home, Sweet Home

 

“Home is now behind you, the world is ahead.”

Midlife is good; midlife is wise. I speak for myself here. At my early 40s now, I am less judgmental, more confident, somewhat immune to hypocrites and try to see the brighter side of everything.

Once upon a time, when the adrenaline rush was stronger and my locks were still untouched by gray, I had a strange reservation for those who moved abroad and settled down in other countries.  One by one,  many of my close friends and acquaintances went away. After sometime, my younger brother too moved out and set his home in Australia.

The Expat Insider 2021 survey by InterNations reveals that 59% of Indians working abroad relocated for their career, a much higher share than the global average (47%). Close to one-quarter (23%) found a job on their own, 19% were recruited internationally, and 14% were sent by their employer. 3% moved abroad to start their own business, which is still a slightly higher share than the global average of 2%.

Statistics and data apart, I tried to talk with some of my close NRIs (doesn’t it sit glamorously on the tongue?) and drew a few conclusions. While all these may not hold true for all, I am confident that many will be able to relate to a few observations.

Mothers do everything within their capacity to get a care package delivered to their sons/daughters settled abroad. Be it a carton of thepla for X Patel in Denver or a dozen citrus lemons (kaji nemu) for Y Saikia in Adelaide, the packages usually clear all airport barriers to reach their destination, fully sealed and lovingly packed.  This goes without saying that everything in such a package will taste light years times better than any hypermarket food that has not traveled from the familiar kitchen of the recipient’s childhood. Now, there are two strategies to deal with such packages – one, it is devoured at once without leaving any traces behind and second and most common, the recipient becomes a magician who works miracle with the expiration dates to make the contents last for as long as possible.

Yes, there are bouts of homesickness. My friend in Zurich spends the entire Durga Puja time mopping tears of loneliness. One ends up shaping memories that will stays alive forever. You might have moved abroad because of the extreme weather when you had to sweat it out in crowded shops or jam-packed buses. The pot-holed streets or the snail-paced official paperwork might have pissed you off. However, if you explain to people from another country where you live now, you find that your descriptions of the place where you were born and brought up are laced with fondness and nostalgia; you may be surprised to feel the appreciation you have for those streets back home and the nasty weather you had complained about!  Maybe distance indeed makes the heart grow fonder – especially when you are born and educated in India and you are cheering for, say England or Australia, in a one day cricket match.  

And when you get a few days off and fly back to the place which you once called home, it strikes you how little everything has changed. Your life must have been changing at a non-stop pace, and you are on holidays and ready to share all those anecdotes you have been piling up. But, at home, life is the same as ever. When someone asks you about your new life, you lack the right words to convey all you’re experiencing. Yet later, in the middle of a random conversation, something reminds you about ‘that time when’…, and you have to hold your tongue because you don’t want to overwhelm everyone with stories from your ‘other country’ and come across as pretentious or bombastic.

You have two library cards, two SIM cards, two bank accounts. And two types of coins, which always end up mysteriously mixing when you are about to pay for something. The two worlds will probably become more and more of a blur over time, but there will most likely always be mail sent to your parents’ house (of the credit card that was somehow never surrendered, or the mobile bill for the old number that you still refuse to part with) or a bunch of boxes stored in a friend’s garage or in the extra locked bedroom of the flat which you had given out on rent.

Then there will be ‘guilt-pangs’. A parent had a fracture, and you were too held up making a life abroad to travel back to take care of him/her; and you mother will anyways tell you not to drop everything and rush back home for trivial matters. You will end up thinking more frequently about the expression on your mother’s face when you could not make it home on her birthday, but you promised to come by the week after. Now, imagine this face when you are trying to explain that you are not coming home for your sister’s wedding because you could not get time off from your crazy work schedule (or, in reality, because that road trip with friends was just impossible to say no to). Rest assured, there’s going to be guilt, and you will learn to focus on quality instead of quantity as the years roll by.

It is as if you are watching out through the window of the car you are driving and  everything moves really slowly in the distance, while in front of your life passes by at full speed. On the one hand, you receive news from 'home'  - birthdays you missed, people who left without you getting the chance to say goodbye one last time, the café of  yore which suddenly shut shop without you having been able to have a last cup of watery coffee, celebrations you will not be able to attend.... On the other hand, at  your new country life picks up speed. Time is so distorted now, that you learn how to measure it in tiny little moments, like a video call with school buddy. A name, a song, a smell - the smallest trifle can overwhelm you with homesickness. You miss those little things you never thought you would ever miss and you would give anything to go back to that place, even if it were just for an instant. Or to share that feeling with someone who would understand you in your new home..

And in the process, you perfect the right balance between bonding and letting go, a perpetual battle between nostalgia and pragmatism. Even though hardly anyone is good at putting the 'good'  into 'goodbye', farewells do get a little easier over time. Maybe it’s because you know that you can go home and curl up on a futon that smells familiar – no matter where you travel to and from. Maybe you learn  to temporarily turn off all emotional organs, and you realize that after a 'goodbye' there is always a 'hello'.

"It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same. Even smells the same. You realize what’s changed is you." (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

 

Mitsep, Morton and more....

We inherit not only values, customs and rituals, but also appellations from our friends, neighbours, cousins, parents and grandparents. The specific words for mundane household items and experiences become a part of our everyday lives, and even when we get to know the correct words, we continue using the ones which were imbibed onto us since birth.

Take the word 'mitsep'. The not-so-high wooden cupboard with cover of wire gauze was a part of every household around two decades back, and some continue to grace dining rooms and kitchens of Assamese homes even today. Unable to find the meaning of this oft-heard word 'mitsep' in any dictionary that I came across, I consoled myself by cooking up the word "mid shelf" for this familiar piece of furniture. I even hammered this into the brain of my brother, who in turn imparted this gem of knowledge to his wife.  So it was "mid shelf", though I never contemplated why it was not "high shelf" or "low shelf". Years later, my brother excitedly messaged me from Melbourne, where he now lives, that at last he knows the correct name of ‘mitsep’; it was actually the mutated version of  "meat safe",  a ventilated cupboard (that explains the wire gauze cover) used to keep meat away from flies and other pests.

‘Mitsep’ memories are abundant among the Assamese who are in their forties now. At my ancestral home in Lahoal, Dibrugarh, we had a 'mitsep' in the kitchen, right near the earthen fire stove (souka). I doubt if it was used for storing meat; as far as I remember, it was used as a crockery unit to store breakable glass and bone-china utensils. It was also the place where ‘cream-biscuits’ were kept hidden behind a white teapot. My spouse recalls the days when his mother used to keep fried fish inside the 'mitsep' during his childhood, thereby doing something right to justify the name ‘meat safe’. This familiar yet unremarkable piece of furniture, taken for granted and placed at any available space in the vicinity of the kitchen, is an epitome of the fact that we never realize the value of something in our life until it becomes a memory. Alas! Today’s modular kitchens within the confines of high-rise apartments have no place for and have no use of this token of nostalgia.

Then there is the ‘gilas’. We have had the opportunity to attend schools which laid immense emphasis on diction, grammar and pronunciation. In our times (here I go again, talking of ‘ our good old days’!), we also read a lot of English classics and children’s books (Enid Blyton, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain to name a few). Yet, in our everyday life, we drink water in a ‘gilas’ (which is usually made of steel, the glass ones being reserved for guests) and never in a ‘glass’.

Adi Godrej will be an immensely happy man to know that every almirah (from Hindi almārī, via Portuguese from Latin armarium ‘closet, chest’.), irrespective of the make, is called "Godrej" in Assam. It's always been the "old Godrej", "keys of the Godrej" ; it's an alien feeling to hear someone talk of the "almirah that was gifted to the bride on her wedding", it's always the "Godrej".

Then there's the game ‘ice-pies’. I know that it’s an almost extinct entity now, the game. The guessing game gained a level of sophistication when my neighbour Ivy shouted ‘ice-pies’ at the top of her voice in her Assam-type house’s campus decades back.  I try to rectify my memory with the proper ‘I Spy’, but I miserably fail to do so. ‘Ice-pies’ rings familiar, feels like home.

There was a time when we did not eat chocolates or candies. It was always ‘morton’. All candies, chocolates and other sweet treats came under the common category called ‘morton’. We got a ‘morton’ when we got good marks in exams, and guests used to come with eagerly awaited morton-treats for the kids. It was ages later when Google became the one-stop solution for everything in life that I searched and found that the Allahabad Canning Ltd manufactures and markets a huge range of products under the brand name ‘MORTON’, which includes ready to eat matar paneer and mango jam. ‘Morton’ is also the name of a village in Illinois, USA.

Reminiscing is a good hobby. I have realized that the older I grow, the more nostalgic I become. Midway into this colourful and profound journey called life, I have understood that the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around me to challenge my account of things and events as I remember them, to remind me that my life is not my life, but it is merely the story I have told about my life - told to others, and most importantly, to myself. As Haruki Murakami had so correctly said, “Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”

 

 

 

Days of Tic-Tac-Toe

 

We have all been counting these days, these dark ugly days, and praying that they get over soon. For adults like me, who fortunately has a vocation that falls in the ‘essential’ category, life has been more or less fine. But think of our kids, those bundles of energy , cocooned up for and endless time inside their homes and peering into their laptops and mobile phones, trying to catch on with the ‘online knowledge’, with the Indian Constitution, French Revolution, Newton’s laws, algebra , calculus and Pythagoras Theorem – and more, trying to grasp everything in the confines of the four walls. Extraordinary as these times are, I try to recollect my own days in school when the best way to block incoming calls when the teacher threatened to call the parents was to put the landline phone ’s receiver off the hook so that a constant ‘busy’ tone thwarted the teacher’s efforts.

In the last pages of our note books, we had an entire world of indoor games – ‘name-place-thing-animal’, ‘chor-police’, ‘FLAMES’, ‘XOX’(tic-tac-toe). And the mathematics class was spent mostly (by backbenchers like ‘you know who’) wondering how to use the divider in the geometry box or by savagely making uncountable stabbing dots on the pristine white eraser. While the front-benchers wrote copious notes when the History teacher explained in details about the Quit India Movement, many of us kept the yawns at bay by filling up the ‘o’, ‘p’, ‘d’, ‘b’, and similar letters in the textbook with our fountain pens.

On the personal front, my most feared class was the Art class. Having been unable to even draw a mango properly, I resorted to the safest option chosen by many of my generation (read ‘the 90s kids’), that is sticking to drawing the ‘scenery’ – the sun popping out in between the two hills with a blue river flowing down, and a hut and tree sitting pretty by the river-side! And yes, sometime during our discussion with the geniuses in the school bus on the way back home, we also got to know that if we sharpen the pencil and put the waste in hot water, it will become eraser after a few days; now it’s an altogether different matter that we did not get the desired product any time. In this context, I also recall another episode, and this is true ONLY for the 90s kids. Remember Ramar Pillai?  This gentleman claimed that he had prepared ‘herbal petrol’ from commonplace plants and herbs. While I was too eager to actually find out what herbs the man used to make petrol and the laboratory requirements for the same, I distinctly remember trying out preparing petrol at home by boiling leafy vegetables and leaves from the flower-garden with salt and lemon juice , albeit with not-so-good results. 

These days the school kids are swanky and practical. And I too regarded myself so when I was young. Thoroughly inquisitive and enterprising as I was, I remember collecting peacock feathers and trimming them to proper sizes and putting them inside my story books and textbooks – not to use them as elegant bookmarks, but rather I got to know from some legend that if I keep a peacock feather inside books, it will give birth to many more feathers! I did come across many such ‘senior’ legends and geniuses in school who filled me up with ‘intelligent’ garbage. One such information handed out was that only the black part of the black and white ‘Camlin’ eraser could erase ink. Due to this misinformation, I spent a good part of my school days using the white part of the eraser for erasing ink by first licking the white part. Today, after authenticating the fact myself, I know that both the white and black parts can erase ink.

And what did we do when the teacher was either late for her class or was absent? Yes, we spinned litchi-seeds attached to match-sticks, and we rotated out pens on the table (desk). Mimicking the teachers was a vocation reserved for the artistically talented ones. The more adventurous ones got busy smearing the teacher’s table with chalk dust so that when the teacher leaned on it while teaching, his trousers would get a clear chalky impression.

In the absence of proper extracurricular activities like abacus, piano classes, tennis, swimming, etc., free time was actually ‘free time’ for us. We went out to play seven-stones, kut-kut, ghariyal-paani, hetaali and balancing marble in spoons. Another favourite activity was sneaking into the kitchen when our mothers had their mandatory after-lunch siesta, and opening that alluring tin of Amulspray and putting spoonful of the heavenly milk powder hurriedly into our mouths. And savouring the ambrosia little by little by sucking the sticky mass in our hard palates – it was heaven!

And then there was this extra edge over others when you owned the ‘pen-pencil’. They came in two varieties; one, with extra slender graphite lids, and the other type which had multiple graphite tips which needed to be rotated when the previous one wore out. Losing a piece of such a tip was one of the worst nightmares that we had.

Munching on Poppins, Eclairs, tenga-morton, and proudly displaying the Phantom cigarettes on our lips, we had a very different childhood. I tell my kids and their friends, and they roll their eyes and they wear the same expression which we had reserved for our parents when they had told us stories about their childhood. The memory of the long drawn ‘Gooood morning ma’am’ in our classes remind me of the different air and the uplifting charm of my school days when there were no online classes or smart-tech tuitions. The loud shout of ‘stand in line properly’ from the PT teacher echoes in the corridors of my mind, and I realize that the most beautiful raindrops are perhaps those that cling to our eyes, bearing silent testimony to everything beautiful and fragile that still endures. And outside the calculus of real and imagined agendas, rests the days of the kids of my generation, the 90s kids, when life was just different, and where we had effortlessly and happily belonged.

 

 

20.06.2021 - THE ASSAM TRIBUNE

 

25.04.2021 - THE ASSAM TRIBUNE

 

The show must go on..

The pandemic has given us something which we all had longed for – time to think, and do nothing. With our evenings no longer full of shopping, dining, entertaining and travelling, the mind gets enough opportunity to think, recall and ponder. It was on such an evening, when one day just blended into another with stark mundaneness, that I suddenly realized that my pre-puberty adolescent kids were yet to see a circus! I asked them if they knew what a circus was. The elder one parroted the precise Google definition of circus sincerely to the t, while the younger one listened on with total nonchalance and disinterest.

I was a tad disappointed. My own childhood memories include fun-filled evenings in the circus theatre, complete with images of trapeze, rope-walking, maut ka kuwan stunts and lions and elephants entertaining with wonderful tricks. But that was long before television invaded our lives. Just as SARS-Cov-2 virus has changed human life drastically, so did the idiot box around 35 odd years ago.  After the foray of television, the circus and a few other older art forms have been unable to sustain themselves.

But, as impossible as it may sound to my kids and their friends now, there was a time when circus shows were looked forward to with unparalleled enthusiasm by the likes of me who sport salt and pepper looks now. Long before PlayStations, mobile phones, OTT platforms, amusement parks and massive multi-player online role playing games existed, there was a time when circus was an important form of popular entertainment. Circuses were like throwing together movies, video games, web series and concerts all together. In those ancient days of our childhood, circus tents were pitched in the main grounds of large cities, villages and small towns.  With their conical-top tents, pulled up by elephants and hauled around the country, circuses could set up and intrigue people in far-flung places that weren't a part of the vaudeville circuit. Political figures famous personalities and matinee idols (to be read as ‘filmstars’ by the current generation) graced the evening shows of circuses. If you lived in one of these places where the circus tent was set up, the day you were supposed to be a part of the audience was a very very big deal. Imagine getting access to the Internet, movies, online gaming and radio for just one weekend a year, and having to do without these digital entertainment means the rest of the times.  During my graduation days in Guwahati, way past the normal age to sit with eyes glued to performing artists and animals in the circus tents, I continued watching circus shows. I remember one such show in the Sonaram School playground in Bharalu, and another one in the Bhangagarh where there used to be a big empty open space where the Big Bazar building stands now.

I try to recall the acts I enjoyed as a kid in the circus shows. There were the clowns, brightly painted, who used to juggle too. And then there were tigers, and I recall the ‘tigery’ odour whenever they came on to the stage. The flying trapeze artists with flexible bodies. The ‘ring dancers’, and the cyclists who performed stunts with exceptional expertise.

In India, the first circus company to tour was the Royal Italian Circus in the late 1800s. India’s first circus was started by Vishnu Pant Chhatre, a horse trainer and riding master who was in charge of the stables of the Rajah of Kurduwadi. Chhatre’s Great Indian Circus, as per circus lore, was born after he watched the Royal Italian Circus of Giuseppe Chiarini, which was touring Bombay in 1874. Chhatre’s Great Indian Circus opened in 1880, and after a successful overseas tour, Chhatre’s circus came to Thalassery in Kerala, then an important British outpost called Tellicherry. During my decade-long stay in New Delhi, I had heard old rickshaw – pullers and aged taxi drivers talk about the glory and magical aura of the travelling circuses which came to the national capital to perform in the bygone years. The circus business has seen many glory years when the arrival of the caravan of jugglers, motorcycle performers, tight-rope walkers, trapeze artists, clowns and wagons of exotic animals would trigger festivities in towns and villages.  However, in the past three decades, things have changed drastically, with several circus companies closing down due to lack of funds and no government support, as well as dwindling audiences and patrons.

One of the key features of the contemporary style of circus is that it doesn't use animals and works with acts done by highly skilled performers. Earlier, there used to be different animals in the circus acts, including elephants, cheetahs, leopards and even bears. But with the government banning the use of all of these over the years, starting with the environment ministry banning the training and performance of wild animals such as bears, monkeys, tigers, lions and panthers three decades ago, on 2 March 1991, the appeal of the circus reduced. Another factor which added to the diminishing glory of the circus is the Supreme Court ban on the employment and performance of children below 14 years of age in Indian circuses on 18 April 2011. With acrobatics being a dominant activity in Indian circuses, children have always had a significant role in the ring. Items such as high wire, boneless, seesaw acrobat, bamboo pole, China plate are almost exclusively for child performers. This is because circus acrobatics demand absolute balancing of the body, and a child’s body can master the skill better and with greater ease. This is not to argue that all must have been well with the children employed in the circuses – there  were cases of sexual abuse and crude training, and there are missing children and fatal accidents. Nevertheless, with the disappearance of the little performers, the fascination for circus started to slowly vanish.

My kids are spoilt for choices today. The absence of school (as ‘school’ used to be) and the ongoing online classes has given them unlimited and unsupervised access to the internet. The modern-day kids have plenty to choose from, when it comes to witnessing daredevilry. Television networks have conceptualized reality shows around this idea, and the advent of mobile phones has placed similar content in the hands of children. For most people now, including my kids, circus is a thing of the past. The daredevilry, the grand parades of colour, pomp, clowns and performing animals , the nerve wracking stunts on motorcycles and jeeps and the other majestic feats of human ingenuity and discipline, seem less magical to generations of children whose superheroes are in three dimensions and high definition. I admit reluctantly that the circus hasn't been relevant to any broad audience in at least a generation now.  Once the youngest fans who remembered the days when the circus was entertainment grows old and passes on, I guess it is high time to say goodbye to circus for good. It is time to accept that the end of the circus as a nostalgia act is here, now. Though no longer relevant as modern entertainment, the history of the grandeur of the circus industry as our generation knew it, ought to recalled and analyzed. And to the entire entertainment industry today, the end of the circus should be taken as the beginning of knowing the audience and delivering what they want. The audience of my days loved circus, and now the show must go on with what this generation wants – nothing related to the wonderful circus shows of my childhood….

 

Ice cream, Cow and Eid….

 

I remember this particular episode because it was the first time when I first saw a ‘ice-cream cone’…It was in the mid 1980s, in a sleepy town in lower Assam, and it was a time when attending Eid lunches at a Muslim  friend’s home did not amount to ‘sedition’ in my democratic country.

Iftikar Uncle had a unique flair, and he looked like Jackie Shroff in ‘Hero’..I remember his sharp features, the baritone voice, the healthy moustache…He was my father’s friend. My seven year old mind was not mature enough to understand the hush-hush talks about Iftikar Uncle and Kakoty Aunty. Kakoty Aunty must have been a good two decades younger than her Chief Engineer husband. With bob-cut hair, and donning sleeveless blouses with intricate pipin, Aunty was what now we call ‘sexy’. I remember that Aunty baked, and she baked wonderfully. It was at her place that I first saw and tasted ‘marble cake’ , something which I learnt to bake too later in my life.

Let’s call the sleepy town in lower Assam ‘Rupalipur’, for Iftikar Uncle may still be there, smoking his Navicut. Aunty must have grown old in her husband’s mansion in the riverside of the state’s capital, and she might still bake. (In other words, I am trying to maintain the confidentiality of my characters). So it was Eid time, and we were invited for lunch at Iftikar Uncle’s place. I remember the elaborate layout on the dining table. Uncle’s wife and mother had prepared the most lavish spread which I had ever seen in my life. The taste of the pulao still lingers on my mouth, and I remember the silky chicken which just melted in the mouth.

It was getting late, and my father and his friends, and my mother and her friends (Deuta’s friends’ wives), were chatting and having a great time. I and my younger brother were being ignored big time. No one had time for us. I do not remember any other kids in the household. It was then when Kakoty Aunty, resplendent in her yellow saree and black sleeveless blouse, came floating towards us and asked if we wanted to have ice-cream. I timidly replied in affirmative. She called out to Iftikar Uncle and they both volunteered to take me and my brother out for an ice cream treat. The memory of that evening drive in Iftikar Uncle’s Jeep, with Kakoty Aunty in the passenger seat at the front and me and my brother at the back, remains fresh as morning dew in my mind. We had got down at a shop, which sold stationary items along with ice cream. There, that day, on Eid, flanked by Iftikar Uncle and Kakoty Aunty, I saw the first ice-cream cone of my life, and the chocolate flavoured ice-cream that day set the ball rolling for a lifetime of my romance with anything chocolaty. Aunty turned her kohl-lined eyes to me and said that I can eat the cone too!

I do not remember much of the aftermath. Time must have passed (months? A couple of years?) and one fine evening the truck carrying all the possessions of the Kakoty household leaving the picturesque colony where we lived (Kakoty Uncle and Aunty were our neighbours. They had a daughter who was of my age). Aunty had come to say goodbye to my mother; I remember her tears when she hugged my mother good-bye.

There was this huge jackfruit tress in the campus near the playground. As the Ambassador carrying Aunty and her family drove away, I remember a Jeep coming out of the shadows of the jackfruit tree.

I was too young to understand the incidents and the intricacies of the Rupalipur years. But they do seem to have been full of rich memories and deep impact. Today, being Eid, there’s not even a single invite from any of my Muslim friends for lunch. I wish someone had invited me for Eid; I know many of these ‘Indians’, my Muslim friends – proud of their land and its tradition of diversity – and I know there is disquiet at best and anger at worst at their Indian-ness being questioned. Maybe they did not foresee a time when a teenager named Junaid would be lynched and left to die on a railway station with no help forthcoming from onlookers because he was Muslim. May be they did not foresee that offering namaz would amount to being antinational. Maybe they never dreamt that the entire community will be blamed for bringing ‘corona’ during the pandemic outbreak to India. I woke up with jeers of the ‘cow-protection group’ and flag bearers of ‘secularism’ shouting out of the idiot box today. But beyond the theatrics, the reality is that intolerance has now become a serious issue with important ramifications. The  increasingly violent reaction to Indians who consume beef, the  spate of murders of Indian writers, the feeling that India belongs to Hindus and people following any other faith (read ‘Islam’) are leftovers of invaders who looted our great motherland, etc are common today. Harbouring any feeling of inclusion and tolerance amounts to sedition. To be very frank, I fear recalling Iftikar Uncle’s lunch parties. It’s just that today being Eid, I remembered that day in the sleepy town of Rupalipur, when religious diversity was a part of life.

There is a new reality now for being a Muslim in our democratic country. I know that my opinion does not matter, because I am neither empowered nor do I have the means to change the state of affairs.  One may not accept the reality, but in a rational democracy committed to a justice system and the rule of law, that such a feeling exists should be reason enough to spark soul-searching among Hindus and galvanize a government that claims to speak for all Indians to take corrective action. And I cannot help but wonder, would Iftikar Uncle have stationed his Jeep in the shadows of the jackfruit tree in 2021 to have the last glimpse of Kakoty Aunty ? (Yes, I know that I must have added some flavour to my childhood memories..But then, how does it matter???)..

Why did I WRITE THIS TODAY? May be I yearn for a chocolate ice cream in a cone. Or may be I am driven by the sentiment that I had something to say that needed to be said and which I had not said before, and knowing that no one but only one person who somehow understand me and respects y emotions would read my rubbish.

Unmasked!

 There was this ad for some moisturizer, where a petite damsel walks in the aisle of a plane, and a young man,  enamoured by her glowing skin, wonders if she will come and sit in his adjacent seat. The girl stops near him and asks," I guess you are in my seat".. The reason for recalling this is something connected to my morning trip to the market yesterday. Actually I am a middle-aged specimen, with pimple-free skin, but absolutely not someone whose radiance can give young people dry eyes due to enchanted staring.  My narcissistic wishes (which appeared suddenly..) reached the zenith of surety when almost sixty percent of the men (and almost ninety percent women) could not take their eyes off me yesterday in the market place. Almost edgy with self consciousness,  I stood near the familiar fishmonger twirling a few greying strands of my hair. Mehtab (isn't it too romantic to pronounce  in the sweltering May heat?) looked at me with 'wide-eyed astonishment'. "Madam", he said, " Please finish your purchase and leave ". I suddenly remembered a melodramatic Rajkumar looking at Meenakumari's legs and saying," Aapke haseen pair zameen pe mat rakhiye, maile ho jayenge." I wondered if the homemade facepack of turmeric and curd had already started to show the results. The 'secret tip' to reverse the ageing process was divulged accidentally to me by my neighbour who resolutely negated all the gossip surrounding the facelifts and fillers being used on her glowing face, and told me to religiously stick to the milk-turmeric routine. I hurriedly purchased the largest rohu fish, and asked Mehtab to cut ot to pieces.  Mehtab refused to make eye contact with me and timidly said that he will not be able to cut the fish. I smiled to myself, trying to feel his 'adulation', and left with the fish,  and paying a handsome hundred rupees extra to Mehtab.  My next stop was at the neighbourhood grocery store. People were queued up, with their feet inside carelessly drawn oblong white circles atleast two feet apart. As I approached the store, the four people in queue made way for me. With my prized rohu hanging by a nylon rope looped around my index finger,  I entered the store with the confidence of a film actress, with full faith that I was exuding some inner aura. The friendly shopkeeper was shocked, I could see it in his eyes which darted crazily from my kohl-lined eyes to my crimson lips ( which gave me the vibe that  the laughter lines around my mouth have disappeared). Giving my most sincere smile, I handed him the shopping list. I saw his hands shaking as he tentatively took the slip of paper from me using the tip of his index finger and the thumb and mumbled something incomprehensible. I leaned forward, asking him to repeat what he had just said. He jumped back, as if my glow would burn him, and said, " Madam, please go home. I will have your things delivered at your place in an hour." I was flabbergasted! This man, who refused to deliver goods even after endless pleading,  was today offering to do home-delivery. I made a mental note to thank my neighbour for her selfless divulgence of the beauty secret.  As soon as I entered the gate of the apartment complex where I live, the security boy came running towards me.  He braked a good couple of metres away, and pointed his index finger towards me, and with eyes almost-out-of-the-sockets, he cried out, " Madam, Where Is Your Mask?" Like a person struck by lightening, I stood rooted there.  So much so for the exudence of my inner beauty at the 'young' age of forty-two! I felt sorry for all the people whom I had interacted with during my crazy trip, and the potential health hazard that I had posed to all during these pandemic times.. Nevertheless,  I have decided to continue with my turmeric-curd routine. Who knows,  someday there might be actual age reversal and when the world will be covid - free, I might be able to show off my new shades of lipstick!

হয়তো সেই নিশা ধুমুহা আহিছিল

 হয়তো সেই নিশা ধুমুহা আহিছিল. কৃষ্ণাই নদীৰ বগা বালিখিনিৰ সপোনবোৰ তুমি সোঁৱৰাই দিছিলা.. তোমাৰ বৰ্ত্তমান আৰু তোমাৰ অতীতৰ ঠিক মাজমজিয়াৰ এটা সৰু আলিবাটত মই থমকি ৰৈছিলো, তোমাৰ পৰিস্থিতি আৰু মোৰ বিবেকৰ কথা ভাবিবলৈ মোৰ সময়ৰ নাতনি হৈছিল.. মই লগ পাইছিলো তোমাক এদিন এখন চিনাকি  চহৰৰ চিনাকি চুবুৰিত.. কিছুমান হেৰাই যোৱা মুকুতা বুটলি লৈছিলো তোমাৰ চোতালৰ পৰা.. তুমি মানা কৰা নাছিলা মোক.. মুকুতাৰ মালা গঁথাৰ সামৰ্থ্য  মোৰ নাছিল, কিন্তু আজিও থৈ দিছো সযতনে সেই মুকুতাবোৰ এটা নিৰাপদ ঠিকনাত... হয়তো সেই নিশা ধুমুহা আহিছিল. সূৰ্য  পাহাৰৰ উখ গছ কেইজোপামানৰ ছাঁত বহি তোমাৰ কথাবোৰ মনত পেলাইছিলো তোমাৰ অভিমান, তোমাৰ পৰিকল্পনা আৰু তোমাৰ দুচকুৰ সপোনবোৰ.. কৃষ্ণাই নদী আৰু সূৰ্য  পাহাৰ নথকা  চিনাকি চহৰখনৰ এটি আছুতীয়া  নিৰ্জনতাৰ স' তে মই কেতিয়াবা তোমাৰ কথা পাতো, দৈনন্দিনৰ কোলাহলত মাজে-সময়ে মোৰ কাণত বাজি উঠে তোমাৰ কথাবোৰ.. বৰষুণে ধুই যোৱা চিনাকি চোতাল খনত আজিও মই মুকুতা  বুটলো , তোমাৰ পৰিস্থিতি আৰু মোৰ বিবেকৰ কথা ভাবিবলৈ মোৰ সময়ৰ নাতনি হয়....

Lockdown Rhapsody

“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.”

(William Wordsworth)

 

They say that one should not begin a write-up with a quote. But then, these are extraordinary days! The initial weeks of the pandemic were spent in trying out baking everything from bread to apple-crumble. A few weeks into the lockdown, and everyone from Agatha Christie to Vikram Seth found a new lease of life as I passed days and nights in the company of my books and endless cups of coffee. And after almost a year and a half, I seem to have reached a modus vivendi with the omnipresent SARS-Cov-2 virus, though I cannot call our liaison cordial. But I do owe a lot to my invisible partner.

One of the things that this period has given me is the considerable pleasure of night-walking and the personal character of it. There was a time when taking the car to the gym, all dressed up in fluorescent gym-wear complete with a pink sweatband, was the norm for me. Suddenly that became an impossible feat. I took up walking after the daylight bade good-bye. To venture into the welcoming thickness of the night, all by myself,  is to feel and see,  in a powerful and visceral way, a much broader world than that which exists during the daytime. It gave me the opportunity to connect with our surroundings in a profound, intimate way. Initially it was an eerie experience, walking with masked zombies in a silent world. But slowly, the routine became familiar. No longer daunted by the penumbra of the dimly-lit buildings, walking into the night became a refractory act against the restraints of dissipating the heft of those countless moments having nothing to do, nowhere to go, of the mundaneness of every day, coming one after the other with a ‘copy-paste’ precision.  

The ‘pandemic days’, as we call it, also gave us new words and phrases galore. ‘Lockdown’ became a word which came every day to our breakfast table. Whereas we had come across ‘lock of hair, ‘locking eyes’, ‘locked godowns’ , ‘picking a lock’, ‘be locked in a time warp’, ‘in a lip lock’, etc, the term ‘lockdown’ came heavily upon us in the year 2020. Defining it as “a security measure in which those inside a building or area are required to remain confined in it for a time” and “the imposition of stringent restrictions on travel, social interaction, and access to public spaces”, Collins Dictionary has declared “lockdown” as the word of the year. ‘Containment zone’, ‘PPE’, ‘home isolation’, ‘WFH’, ‘social distancing’, and many other words and phrases reinforce the fact that coronacoinages cannot be shown  the door in the near future. In addition, there are the words which we ‘invented’ during the pandemic era – ‘coronacut’(bad haircut we give ourselves under lockdown), ‘covidiot’ (a blend of COVID-19 and idiot), ‘quarantini’ (a slang term for a cocktail people drink at home while under quarantine during and because of  the coronavirus)  and ‘doomscrolling’ (hypnotic state of endlessly reading grim internet news) are a few examples. Now, almost halfway through the year 2021, as we grapple with shortage of oxygen cylinders, limited supplies of vaccines and regular news of our near ones succumbing to the disease,  the menace of coronavirus continues to shape our lives and language.

Hobbies, buried in the isolated backyard of our duties and responsibilities, have suddenly found a new lease of life. A number of my friends are tending more to their home gardens, and re-decorating and organizing these spaces. Reconnecting to lost interests in real time is one of the best things to have happened during this ugly period. Some people started making storytelling videos, some renewed their love for sewing and tailoring. Still some others took up cooking and baking with a newfound zeal.

I find myself reminiscing a lot these days, about my childhood, about school and college, about archived incidents which had become rusty in the locked cupboard of forgetfulness. I also think of my kids and their friends who have lost a chunk of their childhood to this pandemic. Our dreams, our aspirations of the pre-pandemic days, are in sharp contrast to the outlook we have now. Yes, now though our dreams still touch the sky, they are measured stringently in cautious parameters. Reckless spontaneous acts which made us happy are now strictly rationed, and we have reached a stage in our lives where preserving the self has got priority over claiming the soul.

Turning to relationships, with every episode of curfew/lockdown, passion and romance surrender to survival. Turning to a higher presence in whatever religion we might practice has become highly reassuring. Every morning we wake up feeling grateful for being safe, for being privileged to be alive. There is no means or time to mourn heartbreaks, because lives are at stake. Even the sudden covid-related death is not the end of the road, as a dear friend often says, “Death is death only for the dead”. For every human being who has lost a dear one, this pandemic has driven home  the fact that even death is just a detour in our lifetime on this extraordinary planet, which, in Carl Sagan’s words, is a mere ‘mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’.

 

.

A Kite, A String and A Bridge..

 

There is this famous story about the first suspension bridge over the Niagara River. It is the tale of a 16 year old kite flyer Homan Walsh and supervisor of building works Theodore Hulett. As the legend goes, post the War of 1812, a conflict between the United States and its allies against the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and its own allies, the relation between the USA and Canada had reached a bottomless nadir. But by 1847, the relationship between the two huge North American countries had thawed enough due to two reasons - a booming economy south of the Niagara River, and great economic potential up north. A bridge spanning the gorge was envisioned to provide a highway over the gorge and allow commerce and people to pass more freely between Canada and the United States. A bridge was needed to span the turbulent river that marked the border between the British Empire (Canada) and the nation that had declared its independence from Great Britain just 70 years earlier (USA).

An engineering firm was hired to design the first suspension bridge over what was deemed an unbridgeable and treacherous chasm—the Whirlpool Rapids, just above the famous Falls. Charles Ellet, Jr. was hired to construct the bridge. At 800 feet across, and 225 feet above the water, it was the narrowest point between the two sides. Ellet and his colleagues held a dinner meeting at the Eagle Hotel in the Village of Niagara Falls, to brainstorm the problem. Ellet proposed the use of a rocket. A bombshell hurled by a cannon was also suggested. Local ironworker, Theodore G. Hulett, suggested offering a cash prize to the first boy who could fly his kite to the opposite bank. Depending on which version of the story you prefer, supervisor of the building works Theodore Hulett either personally solved the architectural puzzle of how the bridge could be built, or else got his brainstorm from watching boys fly kites out over the Whirlpool Rapids.

Hulett organized a kite-flying contest for January, the coldest month of the winter, with the goal of landing a kite—and its string—on the other side of the chasm. Dozens of Canadian and American boys responded to the challenge, which included a prize of $5, worth more than $150 in both Canadian and U.S. currencies today. One talented kite-flyer, 16-year old Homan Walsh, crossed the river well above the rapids and successfully landed his kite on the American side early in the contest, only to have the string break. Marooned by bad weather on the Canadian side of the Niagara for more than a week, Walsh finally retrieved his kite and tried again two weeks later, letting out hundreds of feet of string as the prevailing westerly Canadian winds carried his kite—symbolically named “Union”—out over the swirling rapids. Toward nightfall, as the winds died down, “Union” settled in a tree on the U.S., and the string was secured by Hullet’s associates.

And over that string, Hulett’s engineers drew a slightly heavier string, riding on a silver ring. And over the slightly heavier string, an even heavier string. And over the heavier string, a rope. And over the rope, the first, thin metal wire—until strand by strand, one small step at a time, incrementally but irresistibly, the foundation for the first suspension bridge over the Niagara River was built.

And it all rested on a kite string.

Yes, let it be said: there’s a string—a kite string—beneath all hopeful moments when our broken, proud humanity makes peace with other broken, proud human beings. Someone swallows hard, and deliberately puts aside the memory of the latest injury to send an olive branch—or just a twig—to an opponent on the other side …..

The 'Hairy' Story...

 

This is a 'hairy' situation, amidst these pandemic times...

And trust me when I say this - the bristling possibilities of your moustache fills up my thoughts day in and day out. The wispy strands have managed to give me sleepless nights and jittery days!

Wise men - in all probability with flowing healthy well- nourished moustaches - say that the Greek word 'mastax' was purloined by the chivalrous Scots and mutated it to 'mystax', which means mouth or lips. Later in the course of history, the Greeks retrieved their word and rechristened it 'moustakion'. The Italians called it 'mostaccio'. Finally the French gentlemen conquered the prized word and gave the word ' moustache', sometime around the last quarter of the sixteenth century...

I have been trying to understand your recent attachment to those bristles on your upper lip..Maybe you took inspiration from the knights of the Dark Ages who, as they say, used custom-made helmets to keep their flowing moustaches safe. 

I feel a strong kinship with the celebrated novelist Mulk Raj Anand today. I allowed myself to dig the ‘scary and ‘hairy’ dungeon of my rusted memory to reminisce about Anand’s famous short story, A Pair Of Mustachios, and recollected the various categories of the ‘ornament’ which you are obsessed with at the moment. Anand classified moustaches into different categories. The lion moustache is upstanding symbol of that great order of resplendent rajas, maharajas, nawabs and English army generals; the tiger moustache - the uncanny, several-pointed moustache worn by the unbending, unchanging survivals from the ranks of the feudal gentry who have nothing left but pride in their greatness and a few mementoes of past glory; the goat moustache—a rather unsure brand, worn by the newly-rich, the new commercial class and the shopkeeper category who somehow don’t belong. Then there is the Charlie Chaplin moustache worn by the lower middle class, by clerks and professional men, a kind of half-and-half affair, deliberately designed as a ‘compromise between the traditional full moustache and the clean-shaven Curzon cut of the sahibs like them to keep mustachios at all’; the sheep moustache of the coolies and the lower orders the mouse moustache of the peasants, and so on…

While the Indian men seem to have equated the ‘health’ of their moustaches with virility and muscularity fairly early in history, the British picked up the cue later (like you did in your middle-age). British military adventurers started getting orders to grow facial hair to stay fighting fit in cold climates and to command respect from their new subjects in Asian colonies. The modern Indian military is also very conscious of the ‘moustache saga’. The Indian Navy only places grooming restrictions on facial hair, banning neither the beard nor the moustache, and Sikh servicemen have always been exempt from the beard ban. In Indian Air Force, you can retain a beard and moustache if you enter the service wearing these.  Across the border, many Pakistani servicemen are allowed to keep beards, but some have clashed with their superior officers, and even gone to court, over service rules that rigidly control the length and style of these beards. You can see quite magnificent whiskers in certain Army units, like the Madras Regiment and the Rajput Regiment. And when the Indian Air Force's Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman crossed over to Attari in India from Wagah in Pakistan, his gunslinger whiskers charmed the entire nation. His whiskers became more popular than the tales of his stint in Pakistani captivity, and even more famous than his tea-sipping ceremony in enemy land. Many consumer brands piggybacked on Abhinandan’s resplendent moustache. Barber shops bombarded prospective customers with posters of his face. The famous brand  Amul resurrected a four-year-old commercial, encouraging Indians to drink milk and dedicated it “To Abhinandan" - wand capped with a slogan that is also a popular Indian maxim—“mooch nahin to kuch nahin”. The safe return of the moustache, and also the wing commander (yes, in that order), created an unprecedented wave of mass hysteria . While I had not foreseen this sort of obsession with a few hard facial hairs on the tense morning of India- Pakistan’s air battle, over the last few months I have realized how these bristles can make or break destinies...

I have really wondered, and wondered seriously, about one thing – why have you decided to sport a moustache (irrespective of its state of ‘natural growth’) instead of a full-bodied beard?  The answers I dwelled upon were of different genres. Unlike beards, the moustache is rarely a sign of orthodoxy or religious inclination. Maybe you were inspired by the Rajputs, who are synonymous with valor and power; they are historically depicted with moustaches rather than beards. Also, the beard is always serious (remember the bearded Bhishma of Mahabharata with a face-full of white beard?) while the moustache seems youthful and mischievous. Those bygone gentlemen look like they enjoyed their virile innocence, born of a time when beards were beards and men were men, when pathetic bristles did not  make gentlemen sheepish.

For me, facial hair is both funny and strange - it’s a weed that grows across the borderlands of folly and fashion. Maybe it has to do something with the fact that I am a female and can never grow a moustache. A luscious handlebar or an unimpressive patch, any form of moustache  is a great bane for me. Appreciating one is even more taxing. Some intellectuals may imagine that moustaches add gravitas to their already-blooming persona. Sometimes I wonder if a sizeable ration of  moustachioed gentlemen around me wear fake moustaches!!

Words!

As someone who has been an avid bibliophile since as far as I can remember, I have read many books in both my mother tongue Assamese as well in the language I did my schooling, that is English. I have realized that every language has an incredibly complex nature, and word-for-word translation often becomes difficult. While translator galore have done incredible jobs of translating an array of Assamese literary works into English, I have come across innumerable Assamese words which is yet to get its apt English counterpart…

Long before ‘babes, ‘bae’, ‘honey’, ‘darlo’,  etc. came into vogue, husbands and wives addressed each other as heri(হেৰি)  and hera (হেৰা) ; no English word can match the ‘feel’ of hera/heri. This was way before the husband was addressed by the wife with the former’s first name; anyone who did so was considered as too ‘modern’ for those times. Heri and hera are almost lost entities now, with some distant great aunt ringing dwindling memories of those forgotten childhood days by addressing her husband as ‘heri’.

Another word which I first encountered during high school days is mokkel (মক্কেল). The word supposedly means ‘client’ in English (please correct me if I am wrong). But in our daily life, ‘mokkel’ refers to someone disgusting and unlikeable. Also, the lingo of most Assamese people (both young and old) is almost incomplete with the endearing ‘bey’ (বে) which has no appropriate English counterpart. Likewise, it will be gross injustice if we even attempt to translate ‘kamur’ (কামুৰ/কামোৰ) to English – though the word implies ‘bite’ in the colonial language, it cannot match the feeling with which we address a person as ‘kamur’ in Assamese, which is used to refer to someone who is immensely, totally and unbelievably boring in nature…

We have also embraced some words from other languages and have groomed them with our vernacular zeal. Take the word ‘level’ (লেভেল) for instance. ‘Level’, for an average Assamese, is not a position on a scale or a horizontal plane; it implies impudence and false pride or narcissism. And ‘kosom’ (কচম্) for us is much more than the patriotic tirade of Sunny Deol in Gaddar-Ek Prem Katha. It is the emotional meltdown of many a drunken dreams. Allow me to venture into this some more and dig up the word ‘seni’ (চেনি). While for a toddler who has just started to vocalize ‘seni’ will mean ‘sugar’ in English, for the hormonally charged teenagers or the luscious dames, ‘seni’ will simply imply an overtly flirty and cheesy male.

Be it immense wealth or ethanol of any kind (local/branded) or an utterly glamorous and attractive woman, genuine appreciation will be meted out only by addressing the same as ‘maal’ (মাল). While the word was considered insulting and casual in the days of yore, ‘maal’ has become an integral part of conversations these days. On the same vein, when we say ‘baah khale’ (বাঁহ খালে), we do not mean that the person we have addressed has stared chewing on bamboo shafts! (‘Baah’ is the Assamese word for bamboo). We use this phrase to refer to a loser, or someone who has been cheated or taken for a ride. And while ‘tenga’ means ‘sour taste’ in Assamese, it is popularly used to refer to an undesirable and unsatisfactory situation or person.

Imagine a situation where you bump into an old friend and he/she gives you the grand ignorance. How will you narrate the situation to your peers later? You will of course say that you ‘ghenta’ care for people like those. I was unable to find an appropriate English word for ‘ghenta’, but it means something akin to insouciance. Now take the word ‘lilimai’ (লিলিমাই) – it is neither the name of some exotic orchid nor does it refer to any known entity. As far as my understanding about the word goes, ‘lilimai’ means doing something aimlessly, or without any meaning or purpose.

Then there are a few words whose literal translation from Assamese to English will be hilarious, if not abominable. For instance, there is an insect which we commonly call gubarua (গুবৰুৱা); if we go by the literal meaning of this, it will translate to ‘stool-Barua’ in English, with ‘Barua’ being a common surname in Assam (and in some parts of West Bengal too).

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”,
remarked  the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. I guess life would not have been so vibrant and diverse without these words. Rather than losing the actual meaning of some words in translation, we need to embrace them whole heartedly in their vernacular form. And now, let me cap my pen before you label me a ‘kamur’!

 

 

উকলা এক.....

 

তোমাৰ জীৱনৰ মই  উকলা  এক...

অংকৰ থিয় বেৰত আঁউজি,

যোগ-বিয়োগৰ দলিচাত বাগৰি,

কেতিয়াবা নীলা চিয়াঁহীৰ strikethroughৰ আঘাতত

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