About a tree, actually two

I have mentioned the mango tree behind our apartment in an earlier post. In reality, there are two of them, growing next to each other in the same compound. They belong to an elderly lady, of remarkable spirit and physical will, who lives alone in the old house within the compound.

Neighbouring her plot is a house which has been extended several times and is occupied by several families. Among the many people in this strange house is a woman, K, who objects to the trees. She claims the leaves that the tree sheds ‘dirty’ her compound and cause her no end of trouble.

Three days ago, she called the city municipal office and complained about the trees. They promptly sent a few men over to cut them down.

Veena, a friend and neighbour, heard and saw branches falling and rushed out to talk sense into the municipal people and K. She begged and pleaded and even shed a few tears. The result was that the trees were spared, but all the branches extending over the compound were lopped off.

The trees are now precariously balanced, with most of their weight on one side. When the rains come, I won’t be surprised if they just keel over and crash.

The lady whose trees these are shut herself inside the house and refused to come out during the whole chopping up exercise. These are trees she has probably lived with all her life; they probably know each other as old friends do.

She’s well over 60, perhaps close to 70 even, and each week, she diligently sweeps up the leaves from the trees and either buries them (during the rains, for compost) or burns them (during the dry season to heat water).

Not all of us have the time and energy to maintain a garden, but I do wonder – to think of fallen leaves from a magnificent tree as garbage that ‘dirties’ one’s home, while being perfectly tolerant of the tons of un-reusable, un-recyclable plastic that we ourselves bring in daily, seems sadly warped, doesn’t it?

This is a picture of the old house and the trees around it from last year’s monsoon. The lopped tree doesn’t look too bad from my balcony, as the cutting was mostly on the other side, but still I can’t bring myself to take a picture of it now.

Crops and robbers

You are Mallesha.

A fifty-six year old farmer. You live in Maguvinahalli, a village on the northern boundary of the famous Bandipur National Park.

Every year, at the end of summer, you till your meagre 4 acres, sow some jowar and some sunflowers. For weeks you work in the baking heat. Once the monsoons arrive, you continue working, in the pouring rains.

Once the seeds have sprouted and you have a crop, you don’t relax, no sir, you don’t. You build a thorn fence around the field. And a machan (platform) on the peepal tree in your field for you to sit up on, all night. Waiting and watching for the elephants.

Yes, the elephants. They come from the forest, to feast on your precious crop.

Last year, your brother Murthy lost everything in a single night to a herd of 9 elephants. It happened at the very end of the season, a few days before the harvest. He still owes the moneylender 14,000 rupees.

So for several weeks you get no rest at all. Night after dark night you sit up on the machan, shaking your head and muttering to yourself to keep sleep away. They are eerily silent, these elephants. You have to be alert all the time.

You look out of the machan, moonlight outlines the distant hills. The silence is broken by the roar of a speeding vehicle on the highway. It used to be a small dusty strip when you were a boy. Now it is dangerous to cross with all the tourist traffic.

You have heard the tourists pay 3000 rupees for a day at the hotel at the edge of your village. You could buy seeds for a whole season with that! Why would they spend so much just to see some elephants? They could instead sit up in your machan, for free.

The gentle breeze lulls you into a dangerous calm. Your head tilts. You sleep.

Kttrrrrck! You are suddenly wide-awake, but it is too late. You fumble for the match and light a firecracker. The wick forms an arc of light, then bursts. Your hand is shaking as you throw another. It is louder than the last. One of the elephants lets out a cry. You can feel the earth shake under you.

As quickly as they came, they are gone. But the silence is not comforting. You sit numbly, not wanting to move.

Dawn arrives and reveals the damage. In the ten minutes they spent in your field, the elephants have taken half your crop.

Lead settles in your stomach, you can’t even feel anger. Slowly, you tuck the matchbox and firecrackers into the folds of your dhoti. And walk home.

Overhead fly an early flock of parakeets.

On bees dying

Yesterday, our neighbours smoked out a bee hive that had come up on one of their window shades. They had some pest control people hired for the purpose. Kerosene was sprayed on the bees and then smoke of some sort used to drive the more persistent insects from the hive.

Within a few seconds of the operation, our balcony, which is located right below the hive, was covered with writhing bees. When they die, bees do a strange thing – they spit out honey. While thrashing about, they also manage to get stuck in their own sticky spit. Watching them do this fills me with a sort of horrified fascination – purging honey in their dying moments seems like a final renunciation of everything they have lived for. Almost as if they were saying: this honey is what defined me all this while. But I don’t need it where I am going.

Stranger still was what I found this morning. Bees that had managed to escape the kerosene were hovering around, flying from dead bee to dead bee. I wondered if this was an apian homage of some sort, but suddenly I saw what they were doing. They were collecting honey. Did this qualify as stealing from the departed? I think not – bees are unlikely to be weighed down by the same false morals we burden ourselves with. They were probably making the best of a bad thing. No more.

Here are some pictures.

Hundreds of dead bees on my balcony

Drops of honey between them

Bee flying towards a dead cousin

Sipping honey

Dead bee stuck in its own honey

untitled

when you have news
of death,
walk down to tell them.

no, don’t pick up
that vulgar machine.
look them in the eye
and say the words.

consider the syllables.
do they colour
your steel gray memory
of him,
do they hang
quietly
like the smoke
from his cigar?

remember
in their unknowing
he lives still,
until your words
take him away.

if only to delay
your own guilt,
walk down to tell them.

Do they also serve…

December 2006

It is 7 pm. The sun has long set in this eastern seaside city. We are at a bus stop, the evening rush hour blares and glares its aggressive way past us as we cower against a wall. There is no footpath, no shelter, nothing to dignify the daily wait of dozens of commuters. Divakar waits with us, clutching his stick as close to himself as possible, so it doesn’t get in anyone’s way.”What number is it?”, he asks every once in a while. His ability to discern the roar of a bus over the general din is amazing.

When the right bus arrives, Divakar tries to apologise and excuse his way in, but the mass of bodies jammed on the footboard does nothing to help. The whistle is blown and the bus leaves, without him. Until a friendly hand hauls him in, Divakar will wait, patiently and cheerfully. But today, I am nearly at the end of my tether. He has waited more than an hour, while four uncaring buses have left him behind. “Do you know who this man is?” I want to scream. “Can’t you see he needs help?” “How dare you push him!” But it will only embarrass him. So I bite my tongue. Several times over.

A few days ago, Divakar managed to squeeze into a bus, only to step on another passenger’s foot. Perhaps overwrought from a long, difficult day, the passenger burst into a string of abuses, shoved Divakar around, and, emboldened by his apologetic manner, punched him hard. Frail Divakar could take it no longer. “I am very sorry sir, I truly am. But I cannot see. Please forgive me.”

In the silence that swept over the bus, a woman called to the dumbstruck passenger. “Apologise to him, you fool. If he curses you, seven generations of your progeny will be born blind.”

Yet another bus arrives, and this time, Divakar makes it in. He waves in our general direction and we wave back. He would expect us to.

~

March 2007

Harsha’s parents are sitting silent and anxious when Divakar enters. They can barely bring themselves to be polite to the man who encouraged, in fact instigated their son to quit a Masters course at a leading institute, to pursue what he loved best – music. What kind of teacher ruins a student’s life? But an hour later, Harsha’s mother is insisting Divakar have dinner before leaving. His father is almost smiling at the man’s ineffective refusal.

Divakar teaches Humanities at a technology-centred institute. In a campus where human problems are addressed through better and better technology, Divakar makes it his job to (gently) suggest that the real solutions may lie not in the realm of what we can make, but what we can do without.

With greater strength of character than any of us can gather, Divakar lives his beliefs. He has refused campus accommodation so his aged parents can spend their last days in a home familiar to them. He can afford both a car and a driver, but chooses to change two buses and then walk a bit to get from home to work.

Harsha is not the first student Divakar has led ‘astray’. There is Raju who quit a month before finishing his thesis, to go teach tribal children in a forgotten forest. There is Manasi, who refused an investment banking job and went back to classical dance. And so many, many others.

~

December 2008

It is 7 pm. The sun has set, but the sky is bleeding a dark purple. Strange. We are on a quiet street in a middle-class neighbourhood west of the city. We ring the bell at a low, rusty gate. A woman comes out smiling and lets us in. “He is very tired,” she whispers as she leads us to his room. “He hasn’t even had a spoon of water in a month.”

Divakar is lying in bed, his head propped up by a few pillows. He has four tubes going into and out of him. I can see each vein, each finger bone; there is a well where his cheeks used to be. “How was the concert?” he asks feebly. It was excellent, sung by a man twice Divakar’s age. A concert he would have attended in better times. We tell him it was good, careful not to use superlatives, they seem out of place here.

We ask him if he has been listening to the concerts on the radio. He shakes his head. “I can’t concentrate,” he says. I almost smile. Music has never been a background activity for Divakar–it is necessarily centre-stage, never something to disrespect through inattention.

A colleague of his arrives. A couple of students have come along as well. The boy says nothing the whole time, the girl tells Divakar the albino blackbuck calf born recently to the only herd on campus is doing well. He is happy, but the tubes don’t allow him a smile. They leave behind a CD for Divakar. Dhrupad. Good choice, bad timing.

We sit, listening to him breathe. It is from his silence that we know he is in pain. The nurse comes in, helps him up, removes the glucose drip and replaces it with something else. “Morphine,” he says. “It helps me sleep.” We rise to take leave. “I am not giving up, you know.” Divakar slowly turns his head to face us. “I will admit, I wish this hadn’t happened. But now I will fight it. Until the end.” He is rasping from the exhaustion of speaking. He takes a few slow breaths, and smiles. “I will see you in Mysore, soon.”

~

Read, please

I don’t often post links. In fact I can’t recall the last time I posted a random link and asked people to read. But this one demands it. No, that isn’t right. It does no demanding at all. It simply lies in a corner of a busy news site, unread, ignored and very, very still.

Bihar: http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/showcolumns.aspx?id=COLEN20080066718

Hospital duty

He has been here all the while I have. Over nightly vigils and corridor meals, our eyes have met. He is hovering around at the far end of the room, stopping nurses and asking them something, but no one seems to be answering him. He spots me and walks up hurriedly.
“My father has died. I am new here…I don’t know what to do…I don’t even have a sheet for the body.” He is young and uncomfortable asking for help. During the last week, I have watched him get pushed around and bullied by the doctors, nurses, cleaners, everyone because he doesn’t speak the language.
“The hearse driver has refused to drive the body back home because the Singur protesters have blocked the road. They are not letting even ambulances go through.” A moment later, he lets go. “How will it help the farmers if someone dies in an ambulance? What do they gain by stopping a hearse?” The tears come fast and furious.

~

Driver: “That route is longer by 30 kilometres. It will cost you one thousand five hundred rupees more.”
Him: “But…”
I: “Please, I will pay. Your mother will be waiting. Please, just go. You can repay me later.”
Friend: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? This is supposed to be free service, instead you are making money from it! Have you no compassion, this boy has just lost his father! Does he look like he can afford what you are demanding?”
Driver: “People die everyday. Driving on these roads is not easy. Take a taxi if you want. It will cost you more.”

~

He has lost most of his hair since I last saw him. He is wearing a white coat, is barefoot and seated in a stupor in the doctor’s bay of the ICU.
“Come, sit. You look just the same. You don’t have any white hair yet! How is your mother? Is Dr. Kumar in charge? Oh good, he is a good guy. The only one who doesn’t hit on the nurses. Haha.”
Sixteen people plugged into beeping machines lie around us, some resisting death, some resisting life. But he carries on in his normal, loud way.
“You got married didn’t you? No children yet? Haha, enjoying yourself, eh?
An old woman, shrunken by age and hardship shuffles up to the door. “Doctor….”
“What is it?”
“The scan results…”
“Oh yes.” He runs a casual eye over the sheet. “There has been a lot of bleeding. The healing will take a long time. Not much hope. We will keep her here for another week and see. Go, go now.”
He is in a hurry to get back to our conversation. Colour has drained from the woman’s face. Another week in the hospital? But she has sold all her jewels already. She stoops even more as she leaves the room.

~

“Didi, may I ask you something? Please will you speak to the doctor on my behalf?”
I am at least half a decade younger than him, but he calls me didi. It is an acknowledgement not of age, but another kind of hierarchy.
“You see, he doesn’t answer my questions…I am…I am illiterate, so he doesn’t tell me anything. If you ask him, he will answer you. You can ask him in English. Please.”

~

There is a community here. Bonded by similar anxieties, familiar burdens. We know each other now. He asks me about my mother, I ask him about his son. We share food, small complaints about the nurses. A deliberate air settles over those who have been around long. The new ones are fretful, hurried. We wait for them to slow down, and when they sit on these cold chairs, we offer water. Watch their bags, help with errands, tell them painkillers are cheaper in the pharmacy outside.

Who knows, we may feel sad to leave when the vigil finally ends.

No full stops here

It is perhaps irrational, but my first emotion is anger. As if someone else is responsible and is walking around unpunished. Three days a month, every month, for ten years, I bit my tongue, contorted myself into all sorts of impossible positions, drowned myself in every form of kai vaidyam, kashayam and lehiyam, tried every kind of diet every passing aunty or atthai prescribed, and practised yoga in an attempt not to drug myself into comfort. But nothing worked. Not hot water bottles, not induced vomiting, not massages, professional or those administered by concerned and loving hands.

The extremity of pain meant coming home from school early nearly every month because the nurse there could not handle me. It meant hallucinating from the agony and passing out, more than a dozen times. It meant missing important functions and fun events at college, missing parties, and once, missing an important exam. It would be no exaggeration to say it changed my life.

Born with hugely misplaced pride, I made a point of not crying in public, even as a child, regardless of how badly I wanted to. But the pain shattered all that. I openly bawled in school and college, and once even at work, unable to control myself. Well-meaning but clueless teachers or colleagues had no idea whatsoever how to help.

So I gave up. Contraceptive pills, homeopathy, unani, siddha, reiki, pranic healing. I went on a desperate overdrive and tried them all. With great patience and adherence to instructions and schedules. Nothing changed. Marriage was supposed to fix it. Poor M will testify that it has done nothing of the kind. Initially, I was lucky not to have mood swings and other emotional trouble, but that modest consolation too dropped away a few years ago. Now I am inexplicably teary, short-tempered, insecure and irrational for the entire length of the period.

Finally, Brufen began appearing in the house in industrial quantities. The first thing that did was bring on severe acidity. Which was countered with industrial quantities of antacids. Last month, six years after the first painkiller, I discovered I have drug-induced ulcers.

And in these years the anger has grown. Speaking to a homeopath friend who says that in her many years of practise she has seen the number of women suffering each month rise, while the age at which the pain begins keeps going down, only fuels my frustration. Herself a sufferer, she began researching historical records, both from homeopaths and allopaths in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, not only to see what sorts of treatments have been administered, but to understand patterns.

She says the oldest records barely have a mention of women patients with dysmenorrhea. This can’t be because they were reluctant to report it – dry vaginas causing painful sex are reported, ruling out social taboos about seeking help for painful menstruation. But as the years pass, the numbers swell. She says the proportion of women suffering continue to rise even today. And she wonders if altered diets and the explosion of chemicals in the air, water and food are not responsible for this increase in some way.

She is angry too. That no attempts have been made to find lasting cures. That women are fobbed off with birth control pills that in the short term cause nausea and weight swings, and in the long term screw up natural hormone regulation and make them dependent on HRT and other expensive treatments. That the only other option are broad-spectrum painkillers well known to have all manner of side-effects like ulcers. Which is a double whammy – now you not have to deal with the pain of the period, but also the burning spasms from the ulcer. And these come unannounced, quite unlike the period.

I am lucky to work independently and not have an office or boss to report to. It means I can often afford the day, or two or even three off, until the pain subsides. But what of those who cannot? I know from cousins and friends that they drag themselves to work, quietly popping Meftals and Aleves to keep going. Ruining their health forever. Why is it that when half the world’s population experiences such severe discomfort month after month after month, there continues to be so little research on an effective solution? Why is it that no one cares how this affects productivity of one half of the workforce? Instead they choose to use it as an excuse to claim women are emotional and unhealthy and therefore unreliable candidates for more responsible positions!

Perhaps the anger I feel is not so irrational after all.

Mrs. Mukhopadhyay

Coherence or not, I need to write this.

She could not say my name, her own language was less demanding and did not insist on placing half syllables next to each other. So she called me Sweety.

Bald from illness, toothless from age, soft and wide from indulgence. She arrived in Bangalore each winter, sat by the window and knitted violently coloured socks for her twin grandchildren who never wore them. She made mochar ghanto for me, pleased that I liked something the rest of her family would not touch.

She liked to talk. Although we did not share a tongue, we managed, punctuating conversations with smiles when words and actions failed us. We smiled at each other a lot, actually. In these broken exchanges, I gathered that she had once read widely. She was thrilled to see my copy of The Idiot, a book she had read in translation decades ago. She tried to tell me something about it, an incident from the past, involving a man, perhaps her husband, but excitement made her forget the few words she knew in English, and I was left smiling and nodding uncomprehendingly.

In Calcutta a few summers ago, en route the mountains, I visited her. Of course I knew my protestations would be in vain – a sumptuous lunch was cooked and served, despite arthritic knees and knuckles. And dutifully demolished.

I wandered around her crumbling mansion, a cup of sweet and perfect tea in hand and discovered dusty photographs on the peeling walls. She had never been beautiful; her toothless grin was perhaps far more endearing than the heavily kohl-lined eyes and piled-high hairstyle of four decades earlier. But the vulnerability was still there. An appeal to be listened to and, yes, loved.

I also discovered a picture taken with a tall, white-bearded man. I took it off the wall (breaking the rusted hook in the process) and wiped the glass. And studied it carefully. No doubt. It was him. Curious and thus bolder, I put the framed picture on a table nearby and let myself into what appeared to be a study.

Hundreds of books lined the walls. I could barely read the titles. Aa-ro-n-no-k was as far as I got, before I gave up. Just the presence of the books said enough, I didn’t need to know what they were.

An old armchair stood by the window. I sat down. And idly picked up a book on the sill. Distractedly, my mind began slowly putting the letters on the cover together. All the while, I was thinking about the journey back to where I was staying, viewing the travel with the mildly irritated inertia that always follows a good meal.

A word formed on my lips. I said it again. It sounded familiar. All in a rush I knew what it was – I looked down at the book, knowing what I would see.

There it was on the cover – her name. Hot with excitement, I opened the book and saw neatly printed verses. Ninety-two pages of them. Written by a woman I associated with kitchens and knitting. Shame flooded the prejudiced contours of my mind.

I stole the book. I did not have the backbone to ask her for it – my face would have given away every one of my now-shattered assumptions. Of course she would have been gentle and good-humoured about it. Just the way she was with those unused socks.

It still sits at the bottom of my bookshelf. Waiting for the day I will learn her language and read her poems. Secretly, I had hoped to gather the courage to admit my misdeeds and ask her to read them to me.

But I have postponed the atonement too long and now it will never be.

From elsewhere

When coherence leaves me I seek refuge in poetry. Today was very mixed – two births, two deaths. An arithmetic status quo. But emotions don’t seem to have done very well in Mrs. Saxena’s class. Each one demands attention, refusing stubbornly to be cancelled by its opposite.

So one picks up Larkin. So quick to be cynical, so reluctant in reconciliation – so perfect for my indulgences.

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd–
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainess of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends could see:
A sculptor’s sweet comissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
Their air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

And we are back!

Go on, ask them

He wanted to be an engine driver. Growing up in a house situated a stone’s throw away from the Palayamkottai station, he spent hour upon hour swinging slowly on the big, reluctant iron gates watching stately steam engines come and go. At fourteen, he mustered the courage to talk to one driver he had spent many years observing, and managed to blurt out his secret ambition. A few months and a wonderful friendship later, his boyhood dream came true – he rode with the driver in the engine room, watching in complete awe as the fireman fed and tamed the blaze.

He became a chartered accountant instead.

~

An elderly man returns home one evening with an impish look on his creased face. His wife has not seen that smile for a score and ten years. It worries her. He reaches into his bag, and pulls out a stethoscope.

“What is that?” asks his wife, convinced that this cannot be a good sign.

“A stethoscope. I’ve always wanted to hear what my heart and insides sound like. I bought it at Jayanthi Pharmacy today. Here, try it!”

Curiosity overcomes skepticism and she puts the instrument into her ears. A slow smile appears on her face. Soon, the two are listening to various parts of their aging anatomies and giggling deliriously.

~

A young girl wrestles with income tax sums in a numbingly boring maths textbook. Dull, insipid, unvaried, she thinks of strings of adjectives to divert her mind from the tedium of tax calculations. She simply cannot understand how her father could have wanted to be an accountant. When he comes home that evening, she asks him the question. And hears about a boy who dreamt of fiery coals and hissing vapours. But for whom life had other plans.

~

That generation had all manner of aspirations, but stuck to the well-trodden path. In the indignation of youth I thought they were chicken, not daring enough to be different. That they sought the solace of the familiar. Mellowed by age and my own failures I now know these weren’t surrenders, they were sacrifices. Very often made at the altar of dire financial and social straits.

That man who works in the bank knows a card trick. Or two. That shop lady’s house has the most gorgeous watercolours you ever saw. Go on, ask them to show you.

(Danke, Fraulein Mercury. We bow to your feed reader.)

One world

Many thousand kilometres from my home in the Deccan, I sit under a clouded English sky, ancient hymns playing the background, reading about elections in Israel, chatting with a colleague from Pakistan.

And fail completely to understand why we war.

An annual affair

Three hundred and twenty-three. She knew exactly how many books lined the sagging shelves. She looked forward to this annual task, this day when she would remove each lovingly bought or gratefully received book from the shelf, each neat bundle of clipped papers and unclothe them from the delicate raiments of dust. She liked using the soft brush bought many years ago at the Dussera fair, examined and put to work once a year. She liked removing the pheromone traps and sticking on new ones, although there were no more silverfish to catch. She liked running her finger over the fading ink of dedications and good wishes. She lingered annually over the same words…had he really meant that?

To her mind, this yearly ritual was as important as any of the festivals crowding the months after Aadi. What a silly name for a month, as if it were a female goat. She remembered a book about a boy and his flock, set in the high mountains of Albania, a sad story whose details had long been forgotten. Only the memory of sadness remained. Where was that book now? Had she given it to that chitti’s daughter? That child who had seemed so much like herself, content to bury her nose in a book anytime, but who had turned out so different, choosing the kind of career path that left no time or even inclination for the glamourless pleasures of reading.

So many books had resided all too briefly on these shelves, so many whose whereabouts she no longer knew. It would be an interesting project to investigate what happened to those that had left her possession, either given away or taken without consent. Most ended their lives in a recycling factory, she suspected. Some may have been torn out and swirled into those clever cones for serving steamed groundnuts. Did someone unroll the paper after the nuts were consumed and read those snack-moistened lines? Did they live their young lives longing to know what happened next, combing library after library trying to trace a book that had the characters Suprabha and Hru?

She missed some of those that were lost. One titled the Forbidden Sea, about an orphan boy diving for oysters, always looking, hoping, seeking to find the rare and precious black pearl. She recalled little about the book besides the long descriptions of techniques for holding one’s breath underwater. She had unsuccessfully tried them herself, at the age of eight, when a neighbourhood swimming pool had seemed as vast as the sea in the book’s title. She remembered another lovely Russian tale about a little boy who makes a letterbox from an old shoe. And oh yes, the one about the unwell little girl and her elephant. She had cried night after night for the girl in the book with her large, sad, brown eyes, who lay on her bed listless and barely able to speak, longing with the longing known only to children, for an elephant. That memory made her bitter. How could someone just take away the book? Had they no shame? Had they no sense of what it would mean to the book’s owner?

But some of those that had gone had come back, unexpectedly, in shiny new covers, revived thanks to the wisdom of some unnamed soul at some publishing house. A new print of Kamala Laxman’s Thama Stories had been discovered with great delight at a bookstore some years ago. Complete with illustrations by the inimitable RK Laxman, the book simply had to be bought by the dozen and distributed just as impulsively.

She stood on the swivel chair cautiously, risking limb rather than walk to the dining room to fetch one more stable. The top shelf was always the neglected one. Its contents changed over time, but by unspoken understanding, it was where books that were no longer used or read were retired to; too familiar or carrying too heavy a sentimental burden to dispose. The old Pears Cyclopedias sat here. 1977-78, 1982-83, 1992-3. Once treasured, now no match for their electronic successors. Three of the Childcraft series and one of volume of How Things Work. The latter had four names on the inside page, each written after striking out the previous owner’s claim. All boys. She smiled, thinking of how the book had been given to her cousin, but she had spent so many hours pouring over the book’s fascinating diagrams, that he had told her to keep it.

The shelves now rarely welcomed new additions. She was at that age where the immediate always edges out the important. But come back to them she would. In a few years the shelves would receive the attention they deserved. A new coat of paint, new glass for the doors. Perhaps if the additions began to trickle in again, a new shelf would be needed. She frowned, thinking of where it could possibly fit. But there was time enough to worry about that, she told herself. For now, the joy of revisiting old friendships, reliving old thrills would do.

You mean Imphal is not a state?

The closer my deadlines, the stronger the urge to ignore them and blog-surf away, especially when it is late at night. Usually a cloud of all-forgiving benignity settles over me at this time of day and I am willing to overlook the world’s faults rather than get all worked up as I normally do.

But not today. There has been a largish dose of what Krish Ashok calls the Paratha-Parotta war in the world of blogs, and I feel compelled to add momos to the menu.

Despite having lived in the north for more than a decade and having learnt to fight in Hindi before I learnt a single cussword in Tamil, I used to get rather pained by the broad-brush painting of half the country as ‘Madras’ and all the other displays of geographic and cultural ignorance so well-detailed in the blogs linked to above.

But that was until I began working in the north east of the country. Before I went there for the first time, innumerable people asked me if it was safe travelling in ‘tribal areas’. If I would get anything other than raw meat to eat. If there were roads to the places I needed to go. What language would I speak to the ‘tribals’ in? What would I do if I fell ill? And so on. Initially I delivered long lectures on how the north east is perfectly safe, in fact safer than many other parts of the ‘mainland’, told them that the people I was going to work with all spoke not only Hindi but also fluent English, that they have some excellent roads up there thanks to the Border Roads Organisation. After about a week and twenty such encounters, I stopped. I snapped if the mood demanded it or merely smiled and said nothing.

So what is my point? That most of the people asking these questions were supposedly ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘culturally aware’ south Indians. Why is our collective ignorance about the north east somehow less offensive than the Delhiite’s uninformed view of Madras?

We snigger at Americans who don’t know that you can’t drive a Hummer to Eye-rack, but how many of us know the capital of Tripura? Who among us can name all the north eastern states? Hell, do you even know how many there are?

But it doesn’t matter, does it, because all those places and people are really Chinese.

Condolences

An old man
erudite, accomplished,
widely known for unfailing
articles on solstices
and equinoxes,
dies.

Acquaintances,
colleagues, students
rush to write letters
not to the family
but to editors.

Tributes and eulogies
fill the columns.
I was his favourite student,
says one.
And I topped his class,
admits another.
I am writing
from the States,
adds the next.

Only one remembers
that the man walked
slowly
from home to lecture
and back.

No one ever
gave him a ride.

—

This could do with much more polish, but it was written in the heat of the moment. I’ll try to improve it, soon.