The making of salt

Sprawled beside the Eastern Express Highway, one of the busiest highways in Mumbai connecting CST to Thane, lies the salt pans or the salt flats, running for about 8 kms. These are the lowest points in mumbai and a buffer between the city and the sea. These are mangrove areas.They act as sponges during the rain to prevent flooding. The salty sea water is allowed to dry from September after the monsoon ends. Workers spend about seven months in a year pounding the damp fields where sea water crystallizes into white unrefined salt. Salt takes form between January and March under conducive weather conditions, when it is collected. Happy salting!

Doll's House

It was raining in a light steady drizzling way when I got down from the Toto in the middle of the road. There was a road to the right and one to the left. With little houses of just about any shape and random statues of just about any size strewn about, it was as if a little boy had abandoned his toys and run back home in the rain. I looked around and felt lost, but that’s what I usually feel under most circumstances. “Is this where they make dolls?” I asked the Toto driver in the most idiotic way possible, ”Are the workshops here?” He nonchalantly waved in an indefinite direction with an even more vague “All here” and sped away. So I stood there in the middle of what I felt was nowhere, trying to mentally sort out the place, manage my bag , umbrella, camera and wondering what to now make of my ill-defined fancy.
For I had been longing to come to this little place called Ghurni in Krishnanagar, about 3 hours from Sealdah station in Kolkata. (Now Sealdah station is one living hell and filthy beyond measure, but that’s the only bad part of the journey). This was going to be a magical place with obscure artists engrossed in crafting earthen dolls with a finesse unmatched in the country. Maybe they would be sitting in little thatched huts with clay figures and colours all around them. These were the nightly yarns I had been spinning inside my head. Now I stood, brushing away the raindrops from my eyes and looking very touristy and very stupid. “I have no idea what to do”, I finally said out aloud. I took one road and started walking along it. It was a Sunday afternoon and the shops dotting the left side of the road had most of their shutters down. I walked up and down the street for a couple of times, trying to take in the scene. Nobody was making dolls, but there were plenty for sale. One old man at the back of a long shop seemed not too pleased at questions. Large white busts of Indira and Rajeev, Rabindranath and Vivekananda stood outside the shops. Inside were small human figures, fruits, birds, framed goddesses, fat bellied Ganesha, bronzed wall hangings, Jesus on the cross, greek looking soldiers and women and a lot of jumbled up stuff that did not register in my head. Here was an odd mix of strikingly good and extremely ordinary work all side by side. Some of the shops had a name followed by a “Gold medallist”, “President’s awardee” tagged along. Not many people seemed to be about and I hesitantly peeped in most of the shops and found them empty. The owners were nowhere around.

And then I spotted one lone man sitting in corner in a crooked triangular room just off the street, bending over with a brush, giving finishing touches to a doll. He was a middle aged man with very yellowed fingers, with some dozen and a half little colourful humans beside him waiting to spring to life. It was a bare shop, with rows of Jaadu dolls in the glasscase behind and a couple of water bottles in front. On the floor was the saffron baul and his baulni, the farmer and his wife, the African tribal drummers- pairs of 9 inch dolls, clothed in bright colourful dresses and exqusitely done features. They make them in four sizes- 4,6,9 and 12 inch human figures. And this is what Krishnanagar’s terracotta art is famous for.

I asked hesitantly if I could take photographs. And then his disarming smile made me sit down at the edge of his tiny shop and ask him everything I wanted to know about this place. He was so frank, so utterly at ease, all the while giving finishing touches to his dolls. But he wouldn't sell them to me. And there came the first hints of the sinister troubles haunting this magical little village. The craftsmen are mostly all bound to the local shopkeepers. These people provide the capital, though delayed and they pretty much control all orders and sales. The local shopkeepers, who I talked to later in the day, were frank that they did not want to sell outside this place. They wanted the trade to remain in Ghurni. Even if that meant the gradual dying out of the superior art. For it was dying out. With less demand for superior work, craftsmen were forced to create and recreate the same stock figures without the scope or the money or the leisure for new and path breaking creations in human figures. Ghurni is slowly spiralling into a rut of stagnation.

As I was musing thus, the drizzle changed to a downpour. I ran for shelter. And then- there it was - abandoned on the roadside, without so much as a cover to shield it from the gusts of rain. Pieta. Michelangelo’s masterpiece. As I stood transfixed, never having expected to chance upon that classical wonder of world sculpture in the little town of Ghurni of all places, somehow it felt more appropriate here than in the pristine marbled hall of the St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican. This rugged surrounding is where Pieta was at home-with the rickety shacks of Bamboo, tarpaulin and whatever-was-available to make the little homes around, the rain flowing down the body of lifeless Jesus in Mother Mary’s arms- as if the sky above broke down to shed her tears where the mother’s grief had shocked her to a tearless silence. Then a little girl with happy bright eyes peeked shyly. The spell was broken. “Who made this?” I asked her. She pointed to a low one storeyed house. I smiled.

This was our Pieta. Crafted from clay and moulded in fibre glass. And at that moment I felt this recreated adaptation, oddly enough, defined our cultural outlook. For we have embraced whatever took our fancy from the world around and made it our very own- be it Chinese cuisine or Lucknowi Biriyani, immortal poetry of Rabindranath set to Scottish tunes or the stories of Ram and Krishna crafted on the walls of iconic Bishnupur terracotta temples- seamlessly harmonized with scenes from Muslim royal courts and fire breathing dragons. Or the clay models of African tribals and Thai farmers made in Ghurni. The Durga Puja witnesses one of the largest art and sculpture displays scattered all over the state. In that is seen the most spontaneous fusion of every art form from classic Bengal folk to free form modern to tribal to Greco-Roman stylized image of the Goddess. It is during the Pooja that Ghurni is devoid of artisans because almost everyone goes to the cities for making the clay idols. Despite the stagnation and falling sales in Ghurni, work during the Pooja's is what keeps artists going. The essence of Bengal is captured in the fakirs and bauls of Bolpur, the boatmen’s soul rupturing Bhatiali, the Chau dance of Purulia, in the rhythmic swaying kirtan, in the verses of the rustic Vaishnav padabali. In Ghurni's little clay dolls it is this Bengal that comes alive. For, Bengal, is essentially folk, never having sacrificed free form art to make it institutionalized and frame bound. The boundaries have remained porous- for blending in with the world culture at large. Therein lies the elusive sweetness of this land. Therein also lies our shortcoming- of never realizing our potential, of staying content with a certain level of mediocrity and seldom pushing ourselves towards excellence. Thus we have heart wrenching songs of loss and poverty and suffering, songs which stir us to the very core in their earnest poignancy- but have we ever been able to create that mastery with songs of hope, of happiness?
We need to discover that throbbing pulsation of raw energy in Bengal’s art forms and take it to a larger arena on the world stage- where it indeed belongs.

Having crushes

Pothead never had this feeling before while watching Dil Chahta Hai. It was half past three. What would the time be at BB’s place? Ok…some hours back. He should be pretty much awake now. She let the phone ring once and cut the call. Some 10 minutes passed while she waited for the call to come. The new cat was meowing in the corridor. She had to go to the washroom. What if…..but 15 minutes passed. Noh! It wasn’t going to come now. She looked out for the cat and rushed quickly across the corridor. It wasn’t those days anymore. People had work, get that into your head duffer. It was five minutes to 4 when she could not resist giving another ring. Immediately there was a returned missed call. For no good reason she sat up on her bed laughing, holding the phone. A couple of minutes later the call came.

Two months later, the first thing she said was “Exactly why have all stories got to revolve around guys?”

The sleepy voice on the other side sounded confused, Hello…this is?

ME! Screamed Ph into the phone, Me, Me, Me. She obviously was her grandmother’s grandchild. The granny in question always picked up the landline and said “Ami bolchiiii” with full confidence expecting the other person to obviously get her voice. That never failed to annoy Ph back then.

How comes you have lost my number again? You’ve already taken it from me some 30 times.

BB broke an yawn midway and hastily said, I I…its there. I don’t know why only the number came up now….I was wondering who’s calling at half past four from India….I well…

Its five minutes to four, what sort of a clock do you keep? And whatever, I was watching Dil Chahta Hai.

Uh…ok…um…nice film.

Why has everything got to revolve around you guys? Its your lives, your friends, your jobs, your holidays….with girls thrown in between as fillers…

Naturally, we lead more interesting lives.

Like what?

You are sounding feminist, you know that, right?

So, anything that questions this patriarchal model has to be feminist? Fine, feminist, granted. But this isn’t fair. You get to have all the fun.

Dekh, men create history. They dream. They have visions of transforming this world.

They are certainly doing a great job for the last few thousand years, I can see that.

Stop talking like a girl. You guys never create anything worthwhile and then blame it on men for having all the fun and being the authors. Which woman has written another Man and Superman?

Now man and Superman was Ph’s pet favourite.  And no one reminded her more of John Tanner than Blackboots. She hated Anne, btw, and never figured out why all of Shaw’s heroines (minus Eliza) were the sly hateful lying plotting flirting type. BB had found Anne eminently attractive, as men will, of course, even when you could glaringly see how she led poor Octavius on and dumped him unceremoniously, and lied left and right to keep up her damsel in distress appearance. And then one day BB found the Anne. Through all his gushing of this perfection in feminine form, she listened with a bored face and kept asking herself why perfectly sane (well. Not quite in this case) and terrifically intelligent guys fell for this kind of trope. He even got it into his head that her beauty parlour visits were an expression of her independence and personality. He alternately grew jealous and awestruck at the ease with which she juggled ex, present and future admirers. He developed a newfound admiration and respect for her lack of propriety and in-your-face vulgarity of speech. And then he went hibiscus hunting with her, of which to make a paste for her hair. All of this had the side effect of a profusion of written matter which kept piling up in Ph’s mail. Plodding through a steady stream of undivided faith directed at her highness, Ph banged her head on the creamy wall one day. Hey Ram, now he finds she has blue eyes! Like, seriously?

Dekh BB, I think there’s just too many people I am falling in love with.

Oreeee! That Happens. Good, good….

BB is never surprised at anything. Especially thought related. You’d think he has already thought up everything there is to think.

You don’t get it. Its not like I really love them. I’m not feeling any selfless sacrificial kind of love for anybody. Its rather self centered really. I’m getting the flutter in the stomach about too many people. That can’t be happening. I mean I know I’ll never be able to live with almost any of them, and I’m not even sure if I’d like to make out with most of them,…

Eijonnei tor kichu hobe na re. You actually tried to think of domestic scenarios with each one? And like tick them off?

You don’t do that?

NO!

Me and Pothead

“When I am doing nothing,” I said out loud, “You do something? When?” said Pothead to the white ceiling with her eyes growing wider in undisguised astonishment. Now, as you know, there are these born critics. They won’t let others finish a sentence without interjecting some of their senseless alternative critical observations in between. Ofcourse that makes you lose your chain of thoughts-and I mostly get rather irritated when someone interrupts me with a snide comment when I am right in the middle of constructing an elaborate empirical oracle like statement. Not to say that Pothead looks downright hyperactively funny when she makes her overblown facial and hand gestures to convey a point. Someone should tell her this is not the stage and the audience is not sitting 30 feet away from her to necessitate exaggerated expressions. But the thoughtful compassionate person that I am, I rarely point out other people’s flaws, unlike some obviously intolerant people around.

And while I was thinking all this out, Pothead naturally had to comment on my silence. “Oh, you were saying something? I’m sorry. I thought the ceiling spoke.” There, you see. Jab, jab, jab- all the time. If I wasn’t this tolerant and overlooked people’s flaws, I’d have left her company long back. But there again- that’s the trouble with us nice people.

“The ceiling doesn’t speak”, said I curtly.

“Well, you never know. I thought the window spoke to you. Ofcourse, I’m not saying that I have your extrasensory fine tuned perceptions to apprehend non-human communications, but, well for a moment I thought, maybe the ceiling had a case of mistaken identity and decided to engage with me in conversation.” Yawned Pothead.

Blackboots preaches

The trouble with you is that you treat everything like a point mass, said Blackboots to Pothead. Real life, he explained painstakingly, is not a point mass. You have facts and facts, he continued, but you can’t get anything done with them. And anyway, the country is going to the dogs. I mean, how can you live in India? Nobody can! (At this point Pothead found herself rolling her eyes. BB didn’t see it though, for the video wasn’t on and that made it easier for Ph to make all the faces she wanted to). There’s nothing there. Nothing will ever work. Nothing can happen to that country. All that is waiting to happen is for it to disintegrate into nothingness. Why, there’s no point even having an i-phone in that country- you can’t get half the apps working. Now here, he went on impressively, my phone tells me all that I have to do in the day. It tells me the weather, the traffic, my schedule and everything I want to know! He paused for effect. Unfortunately for him, Ph was a woman. She did not get miserable with the new found knowledge that she lived her life in the absence of a gadget which would tell her what she was supposed to do in the day and how the sun was shining. Typical of a woman no doubt, who never fathom all the great and mighty things that hold a man’s interest, but generally her head could process that information. She sat with a “oh-yea-sure!” smirk and let him do the talking.

You don’t see the big picture, he said resignedly. Living in that institute has just ruined the way you think. You work under ideal conditions and get nothing practical ever made. You work under standard temperature and pressure-(he’s quoting his class twelve physics book, thought Ph. She thought of the chemical vapour deposition system she used, the quartz tube she plugged in, the wires she used to fix the ends, the old mass flow controller which she struggled with. She tried to think of it under stp conditions that she should have worked in, mentally pictured her lab, let out a sigh, an amused smile, tried saying something to that effect and gave up trying to put in a word edgeways when BB was in full fledged swing giving his opinion, as a fruitless endeavour.)

Nights of Pothead's inactivity

Nothing brings back memory like music. (Maybe smell does….but only vaguely….because smell itself is so subtle a sensation, that you never remember expressly with what you associate the said whiff). Or so thought Pothead. Is it kinda dangerous to have music associated with moments of intense feelings? ‘Cause you never know how and when years later those strums will come back to haunt you with the memories you had locked up in those by- stores of the mind. Pothead felt increasingly irritated with her desktop. The confounded cd-drive wouldn’t open. She banged and struck the cabinet left and right, but that darned tray limited its activities to making two trying sounds every time. From her half slumber Pothead had woken up to listen to a now hazy strain of music that kept humming in her head. It was close to half past three in the morning- the night air outside was cool, and mostly all seemed still, except the grumbling of her desktop and the sharp dull strokes of her keyboard. Pothead thought of those years gone by when she had sat still at nights getting lost in those rhythms. When she had wept out of a strange agony and felt her heart writhing. It was then that she had known for the first time (and last?...) in her life that the concluding expression of the previous sentence was no mere expression. It was real. You did feel a kind of twisting pain in that part of the anatomy. Damn that cd-rom. I want to hear it again. Screamed Pothead. But you wouldn’t hear it if you walked past her room along the corridor then. Maybe I want a nice juicy kabab, she felt after musing for a while. Pothead had spent a sufficient part of her life in figuring out how she would get a bucket transformed into a something where she would be able to roast marinated stuffs. She could picture and almost taste them in the very graphic memory she possessed. Added to that transformed bucket was a new fangled idea of a cookbook. Well, not exactly a traditional cookbook, she said to herself. But you know, one where she would add her travels and the “background” to the eating. For food is just not confined to the palate, it includes much more (It does, does it not?). An hour ago Pothead was perfecting her old recipe of making utensils out of coconut shells. It seemed kind of “o.k”. The only trouble was to find a carpenter to do the fine tunings (or the actual work really, she admitted). Pothead always delighted in her firm belief that she would get “them” all done someday. The “them” included more things than she could remember. Maybe the only reason she never detested her inability was the firm, almost religious belief that this inactivity was temporary. She had never thought of the execution of her ideas at the present times. It was all some distant future, which never seemed much too distant. They were all there, blueprint and all, down to the very details ready in the notebook which seemed visible only to Pothead. The only trouble was the unlikelihood of the fact that they would ever make themselves prominent before lesser mortals who were not skilled enough to see what was inside the storerooms of her head.

Never mind. She suddenly had a vague idea of fairy tales beginning with “Once upon a time, long long ago” surging in her thoughts. And so Pothead broke into a smile. But that damned cd-drive still wouldn’t open.

Shaw says there can be no new drama without a new philosophy. Pothead had been trying to divine the truth of this statement for sometime. She was always under the imminent danger of accepting G.B.S at face value and believing his maxims as truth itself. She was incredibly credulous when it came to G.B.S. Only none of his leading ladies were like her (As many of them as she knew). Pothead had been thrown back to reconsider her own standpoint on life by the Shavian heroines. They were so sure of their charms and so unscrupulous in exercising that power on men and making absolute asses of that species. And that was principally because Shaw always considered that women’s interest in men came secondary. Men were the tools they used to attain their more important ends in life. They waited like spiders waiting patiently for the fly, and slowly but swiftly ensnared the prey in their web. Hobbes had liked the allegory so much that he had associated the metaphor of the spider with Pothead (:-/). And Pothead had been increasingly making wry faces at the idea.

Pothead was actually happy. She knew it was so grossly improper to admit it under the circumstances. She devoutly worked herself up into a fit of indignation and anger to justify to herself and others that she wasn’t, that she was pissed off with her continuous inactivity and worried about the future. But in reality she wasn’t. The future seemed like it would take care of itself. The present seemed peaceful. She was out of contact with more than half her world. And Pothead did enjoy this sense of aloneness. Not loneliness, mind you. That made her wretched. But there was Hobbes and G.B.S and Blackboots. She had discovered the two essential ingredients to happiness in inactivity. You had to have a vivid imagination and a blissful love of food. G.B.S wasn’t so much off the mark when he realized that the only true love is the love of food. Of course she was acquainted with certain prosaic unimaginative characters who treated food as fuel for their engines. What a pity! Life gone waste, said Pothead to herself. There was something so soulful and fulfilling about taste. Something so subtle, she added after biting into the chocolate filled sandwich biscuit that was lying on her table. What she longed for was a tandoori. Those were the pains of life--- you mostly had to substitute lesser foods for the truly craved for ones. You never could tell, though. Blackboots had this very original habit of indulging in the sort of food that he hated. It was so unique a philosophy that Pothead never could make anything out of it. Blackboots persisted, for the greater part of his life, in delving into the most distasteful of all grubs, because everybody else was doing the opposite. Maybe there was a deeper reason for this uncanny practice, for Pothead always suspected Blackboots of acting a part in real life. Bb “wanted to be” many men in life. He caught on to one idea and then spent a considerable time in perfecting that idea of a man and living his life. In the process where the real life got lost Ph didn’t know. She wondered if Bb knew it himself.

For the first time, Pothead was listening uninterruptedly to Beethoven’s ninth symphony and actually breaking into a smile. She was anything but an experienced listener or a connoisseur of western classical music. Her music folder contained a paltry collection of such works from Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Handel as she had been able to download from the dc hub a long time ago in an effort to start listening to western classical music, inspired by her faint recollections of having heard mostly unknown compositions on the radio of certain Tuesday nights, and more recently of the very unexpected “total”(as you would say colloquially) experience in a shuttle car, plying across the bridge, with an awesome audio system, that had left her dazed and unwilling to get down from the car at her intended stop. Except a few short pieces she had found the rest trying to her patience and abandoned them midway to return to mostly playback collections. She hadn’t admitted this because of course you know you don’t usually admit such things. And then she was reading the preface of Back to Methuselah on her desktop from a scanned copy of the 1921 published book that some benevolent site had had the thoughtfulness of uploading in full, instead of only “preview” pages that frustrated you to no end. As she was devouring the theology therein, there was a mention of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, and Pothead suddenly felt like playing it. She had four files in that folder, of varying durations. Going by the thumb rule that the longest must be the whole, she clicked open the 11:47 minutes one. And there it was! She did not attempt to describe it for failing miserably.

Maybe Ph had never been in the mood to like it before. And now she liked it outrageously. Something in her seemed to be in sync with the music. All of a sudden she felt so inadequate in her expressions; so hindered and bound to express something that rhythmically shook her inside.

One wintry noon

 “I miss having a conversation with my window”, I said to Pothead. “I mean I’m not so sure about how much I really miss, but there’s this empty feeling”.

“You do know that you need to get your head checked, right?” Pothead mumbled with her eyes still shut as she rolled over, hugging her red blanket closer.

The oval golden clock in the light green room chimed nine. The light outside was a soft cold laidback one and the yellowing leaves of the guava tree next door had the soften and glow features of picassa generously applied over them. Not that it was the early hours of a wintry dawn, but the feeling still clung to the bare brick houses, the trees and the curling smoke of the coalfire from the laundryman’s chulah.

“Blackboots said it was much better having a conversation with a window than with most people around. When will you get over this mainstream intolerant mindset of considering only majoritarian ideas normal and pretending the fringe elements don’t exist, Pothead?”

“BB is a nutcase. He’d look at earnest eyed doggies and talk to them on his way back to his flat. And you are spending way too much time with social science students. Talk normal, not like some jumbled paragraph from a book on sociology.”

“You say that to social sciencies, they’ll eat you up alive. They are so in earnest about protecting the marginalized voices in society, the rights of the downtrodden and giving equal opportunities to everyone that if you hold views to the contrary they’ll make sure you don’t get to voice that opinion of dissent and teach you what a social monster you are. They are very very serious about their role in educating the unpad mass about universal brotherhood tolerance and sensitizing them to people’s feelings. So if you think what they are saying isn’t making sense to you, educate yourself till you dream/speak/eat in that lingo. That is the postmodern approach to life-the end of hegemony. And although I am not sure what exactly a subaltern is, but from your lack of holistic approach towards life, I can say you are one.”

Pothead giggled and yawned, winking and ended up getting more comfortable in her fluffy red blanket. I was rather annoyed at this unceremonious dismissal.

Now by all measures, I’m one of the unfittest homo sapiens to inhabit this planet. I really do not know why I think it is necessary to be fit enough to be able to cartwheel, but I think of it as an essential human qualification and I don’t have it. Never did. So, occasionally, on days like this I get real sore about my kamzori’s. Not that I do anything to remedy the situation, which makes Pothead cynically sneer at me and say that in reality what I really am, overruling anything that I think myself to be, is lazy. Dumb ass lazy and a pillow-and-blanket-potato if ever there was one. Not exactly flattering, but then diplomacy wasn’t one of Ph’s strong points.

It wasn’t my Window’s strong point as well, but then she had grander visions. As I said, I missed talking to her. I missed the way she thought she was Iron-Man and the next thing in evolution, making her treat humans as poor little under-evolved things. She was the bigger guy among us. So she indulgently forgave my shortcomings as that of a less evolved being. She didn’t chide me for being idle and unproductive and generally breaking all rules of normal living. Pothead of course thought I was a waster, as did everybody else, well, mostly everybody else. “My Window didn’t tell me that I was creating problems where none existed. “, I said out loud to Pothead. I was annoyed and wanted to fight. Ph’s calm practicality got on your nerves sometimes.

“Neither did I. Hobbes told you that. It’s true btw.”

“Hmmmppphh.” I stuck out my tongue at Pothead. Go, there, that’s what I think of your opinion.

“Don’t pretend you are this unrecognized, wronged, misunderstood excuse of a talent. I’ve never seen you interested in something long enough to give it a fruitful completion. And if you think having ideas in your head makes you anything close to out-of-the ordinary, you’re deluding yourself. Sticking to a job till completion requires determination and you have long forgotten what that means. It’s rather easy, isn’t it, this constant falling ill to get away from responsibilities and ridding yourself of any guilt you may subsequently acquire. People you see trudging at the daily grind keep doing it because they must.”

“And what makes you think I’m rolling in wealth?” This wasn’t really comforting of PH to mention it so casually and offhand. I was acutely aware of my financial crunch and got rather touchy feely at jabs directed at it by people who thought I was having a nice time feeding off other people’s money.

“You’re not, true”, conceded Ph. “But the rest do not have the luxury of quitting earning and still not having to worry where the next meal, the electricity and telephone bills and internet connection comes from. Not to mention the two silver lockets and earrings and brooch you got yourself. And a hoodie. A holiday too. Isn’t that where you got a lucknowi chikankari? And you’ve spent most of your time lazing around, sleeping, watching movies, getting meals delivered by the bedside, playing music, clicking photos and working yourself up into a frenzy or a fit of rage when staying comfortable became rather monotonous to you. What you are earnestly trying to avoid is hard work and you create all these subconscious illnesses to help you skirt the gruelling task that requires getting down on your hands and knees and concentrating your will and efforts to a single focus.”

It was the same old thing of course, reminding me of all the inadequacies I knew all too well I had. Maybe Ph was being a good Samaritan and helping me get out of my comfortably numb zone. Maybe I ought to be really swallowing the bitter pill, accepting I was a rotten failure and get out of the cave and face the consequences. But I didn’t want to get out of the cave on the same side that I came in. I wanted to wander through the unknown darkness, damp and a little scary, and find a way out of the other mouth of the cave on a different side of the mountain, where I wouldn’t have to go back to being me, but could just start off being anyone. Quite possibly there wasn’t another outlet. Could be that new place was a filthy world I didn’t want to be in. Or this cave was so long and had so many paths all leading to dead ends that I’d be exhausted midway and just sit down at a random place and want the tired sleep creeping over my eyes to never end.

It was close to noon and I found sleep wrestling with my eyelashes and thought, trying to shut down both. I had had a filling brunch in what I thought was English style, because I used a spoon and fork and had buttered toast, small little boiled potatoes and a boiled egg in opal plates and bowls. There was some raw sliced carrots and a couple of bananas too, and a pretty flowery glass of milk. It wasn’t exactly an English breakfast, but it served my sense of romanticism of sitting idly on a verandah overlooking the Mediterranean and gazing out into nothingness while philandering with a sizeable brunch. I’d have to be in that dark blue dress ofcourse, the one Deepika wore in Corsica in Tamasha, with loose windswept hair, to complete the feel. But now the thought processing centres were shutting down one by one and the information acquiring ports were going off and on, so I gave up the futile struggle and snuggled back under the covers with my embroidered sidepillow.

There must exist a parallel universe, mustn’t there? What does it even mean? Atleast there exists a universal consciousness, I am fairly certain of that. I worked out the details, but I don’t feel like going over all that proof again. Of course you shouldn’t take my word for it. I’m not asking you to. Here I’m just stating an innocuous fact, well, a theory, no-a hypothesis.

Sleep was a good listener. I liked her. Except when she was unavailable at the right hours and available at the wrong ones. I forgave her for her lack of sense of time, because I shared that trait, but sometimes I was mad at her. She complained I never really listened for her arrival sometimes and indulged her too much at other times. We were both unscrupulous about our jobs and absolutely unreliable, so we forgave each other and got on fine. These days I had tried to time her arrival by sending chemical signals. Now, as it happened, the machine which housed me wasn’t a first rate product. It had a screw loose almost everywhere and somehow managed to jog along. Its fuel processing mechanism was one of the worst, and it was taking infinite time and indefinite numbers of chemical and biological signals to set its trigger well. For the past few months I had been experimenting with frozen live bacteria- ingesting some millions of colonies of these microscopic creatures and introducing them to my internal environment. The seller assured me that this re-introduction of habitable species would bring a balance to the locality, as long as I steered clear of introducing harmful products which took an enormous energy to process, recycle and finally get rid of. Oh well, what was the harm in trying?

I broke a long standing barrier today. Haven’t had a talk with Pothead over it, but I feel so much at peace with myself. I had never played my music loud at home. I had always known how I needed to be considerate about other people’s tastes and not cause them discomfort at home. Maybe I was a little too considerate for my age. I played matargashti loud today and danced to it. At home. With Dad on the same floor. He started out saying he was not in the mood for music. It took me 31 years to say this finally, but I did. I told him, did I ever cause a disturbance at home by playing the music I wanted to hear? I had always known I had to play it softly, too softly, just barely audible to me, so as not to make anyone else feel disturbed. He admitted, I had always been good. So I said, I didn’t want to be that good any more.

At the end of the song he said, I should do more of it. Every morning. It would take the plump out of my gained fatness and make me fit. It was better than exercise, he said.

Maybe I should have stopped being good a long time back.

A boy decided to quit this life. He was 27. A phD scholar from Hyderabad University. The newspapers are all up in arms and some dalit faculties submitted their resignation because he was a dalit student. For the past one year he hadn’t received his stipend. Nobody, ofcourse had thought of remedying that. I read his suicide note. I knew what he wanted to say. It’s just an empty feeling. Just that sense of being when you want to fall asleep forever and never wake up. There are protests and political blame games going on and his caste issue becomes the centre of focus. Meanwhile, he silently decided to quit because life was becoming a much too difficult to solve maze without an end in sight. It doesn’t matter whether you are brave or courageous, there’s a state of mind where nothing matters anymore.