Koyal

Tujhe ek aawaz mili kya tune saara aasman hi apne sir par uthha liya hai
Tujhe marmvedi dardila meethha swar jo mila hua hai
Disha Disha mein, dal dal mein, pat pat mein usko rasa basa dene ko kya tu sach much antarprerit akulai hai
Ya tu apna, apni boli ki mithhas ka vigyapan karti firti hai
Abhi yahaan se, abhi wahaan se, jahaan tahaan se
Woh madmaati apni hi rat gayi lagati gayi lagati gayi lagati

© Harivanshrai Bachchan

Protocols

What can I say to you? How can I retract
All that that fool, my voice, has spoken.
Now that the facts are plain, the placid surface cracked,
The protocols of friendship broken?

I cannot walk by day as now I walk at dawn
Past the still house where you lie sleeping.
May the sun burn these footprints on the lawn
And hold you in its warmth and keeping.

- Vikram Seth

What is so special about Seth's poetry is the simple, elegant verse, the easy to relate ideas that he writes about ranging from loneliness to heartbreak, and the crisp economy of style, not to mention the strict adherence to metre. This is one of my personal favorites from All you who sleep tonight.

Hello, Goodbye

October 22, 2007

Rose stood waiting at the canteen as I got off the Churchgate station and walked towards her. With a distance of about 30 yards between us I tried to drink in the reality. It was close to four years since the time we last met. In the winter of 2003, I was still a kid. Four long and eventful years in which so much had changed. I do not know if I felt more mature as I walked towards her. But somehow I've always felt that childhood had ended somewhere in that winter four years back. And this was merely a stop gad period before adulthood would set in.

As I got closer I took a long hard look at her. A thousand thought ran through my head. I wondered how much she had changed in these years. Had she put on weight? She certainly seemed a little different. Was she this tall when i last saw her?

"Hi."

"Hi."

"Long time."

"Long time."

"Were you this tall when i last saw you?"

It turns out she was. But minus the two inches of heels she sported now. She took off her sunglasses and smiled at me. The same black lustrous eyes. Keki Daruwalla once wrote of a woman that she was a hoor with eyes so bright that they could light up the darkness of the underworld. He might as well have been speaking of her.

Sunglasses, heels, kohl in her eyes. Some things had changed. Yet others hadn't. The same gold pendant which she always wore, small earrings like the ones she would buy somewhere near New Patna Market, a plain white top like many she had. ("Do all your clothes look the same?") But she looked different. I do not know in what way but the girl I had known most of my life had not been this beautiful.

Over milkshake in that college canteen, we broke the ice. My life in law school, hers in the hostel, my brother's wedding, her mother's illness, law and justice, movies and books. We spoke almost like two strangers. Why are we talking like this? Who cares about mundane things like old common friends? About what happened to old what's-his-name and what became of old so- and-so. Let's take a walk and throw Landor at each other or something or make non-executable plans to go trekking on the mountains or something.

Over beer and Fish n chips at Cafe Leopold, things got a little warmer. Past relationships and prospective ones. ("Forget about it. She's way out of your league.") Her bunch of suitors ranging from irritating to interesting. ("Give me call if you want me to beat them up or something." "Like the old times?" "Like the old times.")

"Are you still a virgin?"

Spechless and gaping.

"Oh God! You're blushing like a girl."

"Please. I am not blushing. I was just taken aback."

"So...?"

"What do you think?"

"Who'd ever agree to sleep with you?"

Over ragda patties at Chowpatty, things got a little better. We even threw a bit of Frost at each other. As i was about to graduate to Donne, she stopped me.

"Lets not get into poetry."

"Whats wrong with poetry?"

"Nothing. It just depresses me."

"Ok. Lets take a walk and I'll tell you about a story about how Sunny Gavaskar once got a haircut midway through a test match."

As i narrated the tale of how the great Dickie Bird was once approached by the little monster with the most peculiar of requests which Bird might initially have mistaken for some low form of Asiatic humor but on realising that the batsman was serious he produced a razor-blade and sliced off locks of his hair which were blowing into his eyes and the haircut had a very unSamsonlike effect on Gavaskar as he went from strength to strength and scored his first century in two years, she fell by my side and held on to my sleeve as we walked.

"Look at those dividers."
"Don't they look like Shiv-lings?"
"Imagine what a tough time a person would have pouring water over all of them."
"Do you know Shiv-lings are actually phallic symbols?"

Meeting her was like discovering my childhood again. Childhood juxtaposed with against my present. Old crushes, long forgotten and vehemently denied now, the first whiff of smoke coughed out on stolen cigarrettes and now both of us lit up like veterans("Not bad, you don't wet the butt anymore."), memories of ways through woods on snowy evenings and reading out Shakespeare aloud, plots of running away, planned and partly executed, revolutionary ideas and dream of changing the world.("You're still such a dreamer") But, times had changed. We were growing up.

"Hey, we're growing up!"
"Not we, you are."
"You mean you aren't."
"No, I already have. You're the one who's still a boy."

As she sat across me on the train, both of us were aware of the the very few minutes we had together. A thousand thoughts ran through my head. Four years this time, God knows how many more before we'd meet again. I wanted to tell her how much I cared for her but why increase the pain of parting. I do not know what was going through her mind. All the sarcasm was gone from her demeanour and she sat with her defenses down, her face small and her eyes sad. Why love someone? Life is so much simpler without it. I felt the burden of unwanted love heavy on me. At that moment, I thought of another on whom probably a similar burden lay heavy. We are a chain of a horrible cliche which is too much of a cliche to be even taken seriously.

Two of us

February 24, 2008

My day began at the Churchgate station. It was past 2 p.m. when I arrived at the station but for me the day has just begun. I have always felt that it is an excessively Western thing to believe that the day changes at midnight. There are times when you do not know whether it’s today or tomorrow. You’ve been doing what you were doing since it was yesterday and since you’ve been awake it’s still today in your head. But when you think of it, it is tomorrow. But as long as I don’t sleep, I do not feel that the day has changed. It’s almost as if the day has stretched beyond the stipulated hours and is surviving on borrowed time. There are times when I lose the sense of time and stick to my own ways to define it. Yesterday ended when I left the office today where I had been working all night and half the day and today began as I descended from the train some stations ahead to meet her.

Waiting outside Eros, I am mildly disturbed. For some strange reason, I am reminded of the image of Sachin waiting for a very young Poonam Dhillon outside a movie theatre in Trishul. She never made it for the rendezvous, meeting an accident on the way but she arrives in a while, late as usual, but better late than not.

There are many different ways in which two people behave as they meet each other. Some launch into a dramatic monologue expressing extreme pleasure and good fortune at this opportunity fate has provided them with(case in point a former roommate), some attempt an eloquent pause as they offer their hand for a handshake(a roommate), others still just start off talking about whatever they intend to talk about(another former roommate). But whenever I met her, it was always the same. She always starts by being preoccupied with something or the other, paying the auto-driver, staring at something across the road that caught her fancy but comes out her reverie in a few seconds and immediately launches into an anecdote about whatever happened to her most recently. I am amazed at the consistency with which this cycle is repeated.

We head to The Pizzeria for lunch. As we settled down for lunch, both of us grope for a distance which was once ours. I think we are trying to gauge something without realizing it. Can we still talk? Through a stroll around the Marine drive, a visit to the Oxford bookstore (a tribute to Rishabh) and to Bombay University(is it Mumbai University now?), walking around in circles and letting life take the same course, through broken chappals and aching legs, local trains and five star hotels, discotheques and a trip down the memory lane, we discover that we can. Feminist reflections to “auratein haraamzaadi hoti hai!”, law school and its trappings, new-fangled theories on love and marriage, romanticism and acceptance; we traverse familiar and overdone concepts yet it is refreshing.

“You know I can imagine us not talking for say, three years and suddenly running into each other and..”

“And picking up immediately from there.”

“Yeah.”

Some things never change in life. Her laughter clichéd though this sounds, ready and extremely naughty wit, scandalized responses, a taste for irony, the detached sympathetic way in which she speaks of herself, mean and dismissive yet classy reflections on all and sundry, the half smile lingering on the face, the easy candor. Some others do.

“We’re best this way”

A luncheon date which extends into many more hours through the day, and night as we let this day turn into one of those where two people decide to just sit and discuss their fears, the changes they have undergone, the end of childhood and the pains of growing up, dreams and compromises and how life has changed, for the better or for the worse. There is something about people you know and who know you; you can always talk to them no matter how much life changes. Why do we always talk like this, theorizing about life, analyzing everything from a psychological angle yet the whole process never getting pretentious as it does with others, throwing in random anecdotes, and always talking in terms of general principles without really saying much directly about our lives, yet saying a lot. The past, with all its complications looms large, yet we can talk like this simply because we are two people who want to.

It is late morning by the time I drop her to her place. I take a cab back to the Churchgate station. As I embark the train and settle down, I fall asleep, my day ending exactly where it began.

License my roving hands, and let them go

Before, behind, between, above, below.

John Donne
From On his mistress going to bed

Donne is damn cool and wrote some of the sexiest lines ever. More on this after the Moots are over.

Stopping by woods on a snowy evening

Whose woods these are I think I know,

His house is in the village though.

He will not see me stopping here,

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer,

To stop without a farmhouse near,

Between the woods and frozen lake,

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake,

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep,

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

This seems all the more apt in the midst of my moot week when I have loads of work to do. In any case, ‘Stopping by woods…’ has been one of my favorite poems ever since I can remember. Frost wrote poems which could be read on many different levels, and you could still enjoy the superficial surface meaning. Here, he plays a fair bit with the overdone sleep-death metaphor. Beyond the surface is the more melancholic feel marked by a longing for death and weariness from the pain of existence and the imagery of winter and night sets a fine backdrop to it.