One bashful evening...

 

Evening, Nandalal Bose

Not the prickly cool of morning,

Nor the heat of noonday's glare;

Not the blackness of night,

Nor the gaudy daylight's flair.

 

Evening is a time of transition,

A moment between two worlds;

It is neither one nor the other,

But both at once, unfurled.

 

It does not look directly at you,

But rather, it slowly reveals itself;

It sheds its delicate nature

Until you are immersed in its spell.

 

Like a pretty woman who steals a glance,

Then hesitates, then looks again.

The onlooker is in ecstasy,

Drinking deep of the nectar of pleasure,

Which is tiny and rivulet-like,

Yet he yearns for more.

 

Pleasure is organically prolonged,

Not the gaudy beauty of naked forms;

This is beauty returned to its primeval state,

Coyness itself, a crime for the Mower.

An Arriviste wrapped in the cloak of an Aristocrat

The day dawned bright and clear. Wisps of clouds sailed across the spotless blue of the sky. The morning sun filtered through the coconut trees and created a dance between shadow and light on the yard as I stood there musing and remembering. At that moment, standing on the cusp of sea change, I saw life as a vast landscape waiting to be filled in by milestones. Simultaneously I was certain that I had reached another milestone.

Train station. I took my seat by the window and thought of what I had left behind and what lay ahead of me. I pressed my nose against the window pane and felt the heat of the summer sun. My ears soon got accustomed to the metronomic clang of the rails when a great rumbling jolted me out of my reverie. We were crossing the river. I sank back into my seat as the beauty of the valley unfolded before my eyes.

 

Paddy fields crisscrossed by ditches dominated the landscape. Occasionally, a group of young boys would stand and wave at the passing train. Two greater adjutant storks flew away as an urchin took aim with his sling. A man scratched his head as he inspected the roof of his house damaged by the first showers of monsoon. All of a sudden, an array of majestic trees shot towards the sky and blocked my sight. Heavily forested tracts rushed past me and for a while I could see nothing but a flurry of green and occasional glimpses of the setting sun, its angry crimson leaking into the surrounding blue.

 

                                                                                      *******

 

The night had wrought much change in the scenery. Fields and forests gave way to brown patches of land. The air became dry and dusty. Men in bright turbans drove tractor-trolleys through narrow tracks in fields scorched by the sun. Women were feeding cattle tied to brick walls. Diesel generators pumped water from tanks into the sparse crops and beyond, a monochrome landscape dotted with dry deciduous vegetation and tropical thorn unfolded towards the horizon.

After an hour and a half, the roaring rails calmed down and the train pulled into the station. I stepped into the crowded platform and then into the graveled road hemmed in by tenements that housed the local gentry. The air was charged with the shrill cries of peddlers and long mowing of stray cows. But the asphalt ogre could not deter me. I had found the winding path. I only had to follow the beautiful, winged insects. How wonderfully true Pope's words are! Hope indeed springs eternal in the human breast. The future beckons and we move on. No matter how devastating the river is, it always calms down in winter. No matter how long the night is, the sun always rises. Thin slivers of hope fly in the horizon and lure us. We never fail to stretch our hands towards those ethereal objects.

 

                                                                                      *******

 

The stately building looked as if it had stood there for ages. The July sun beat down relentlessly and made me sweat like anything as I struggled with the luggage. Presently there appeared the residential block and I hobbled towards the doorway. A whiff of air - heavy with the smell of fresh limestone - hit me like a rapier as I walked through the arched corridor and entered my allotted room. It was cool and scantily lit inside. As I started the ceiling fan and disposed the bags on the floor, I remembered something and went out.

A pallid tint had suffused the sky when I returned after an hour. The tree tops were ashen and shadowy. The nimbus floating above dangerously soon sent down trails of rain. My hair hung in wet, oily tendrils but a cool breeze soothed me. I was already late for the meeting with the Principal. Evening set in and the moon rose.

 

                                                                                      *******                                                                                                                                                        

I stretched out my body on the mattress. My groin ached. But sleep would not coddle my tired eyes. The pair of fluorescent tube lights in the corridor outside the room did not help matters either. My gaze was fixed on the ceiling fan. The monotony of the fan sent my mind on a tailspin. The journey would be long and tiring but I have to move on. The future throws open its arms and it’s almost impossible to resist the urge to lunge forward and embrace it.

I woke up with the larks the next day. Pleasant rays of the sun played on a great mass of periwinkles outside the window. In a neglected garden patch nearby, common daisies thrived in the shade of a dead fountain. I went out for a walk and greeted the gardener who was hosing the saplings in the nursery. In the middle of summer, I felt as if spring had returned. I realized that there was within me an invincible spring. My heart leapt up. 

 

                                                                                          *******

 

          Corridors bustling with students and teachers, classrooms fitted with wooden panels. Well, I was in one of them when the teacher, a middle-aged woman dressed in shorts wobbled in and stared at the new batch of students, her throat curved in a mother goose smile. After the introductions, she waxed eloquent about Browning, Tennyson and Rossetti and posed a riddle: Did God create man or man create God? Some of my new friends were clever enough to answer, but I sensed that they were concerned not so much about what was said as much as how it was said. I was lost most of the time and spent the hours looking hard at my book. I was scared of attracting the teacher’s attention lest she made me answer a question or read out extracts. I was afraid that my provincial accent would unmask who I really was – an arriviste wrapped in the cloak of an aristocrat.

          Slowly I grew accustomed to campus life. My roommate was from the South, scion of a rich family who spent their vacations in Cambridge. In the room diagonally opposite to ours, there lived a tall, tough guy who looked at his campus life casually as an extension of his schooling at a convent in a hill-station. And of course, there were the outliers and the misfits and I was soon accepted into their company, but not without a pinch of salt. I was a student of english literature and that was enough to drive a wedge between us. Most of them studied disciplines that required very little acquaintance of the english language. They regarded me with awe but the next moment, I would comically deflate myself by (mis)pronouncing a word or phrase that unmistakably betrayed my provincial roots. Yet I was too clever for them. I started dropping names – Evelyn Waugh, Fitzerald, Alberto Moravia – and they would immediately take a step backwards, unable to pin me down, yet unwilling to let me escape from their hold.

My passion for literature earned the respect and admiration of my friends. I wrote for the college journal, joined the poetry club and met some writers with whom I shared bits and pieces of my writings. In the semester exams, I scored well and in seminar presentations, earned the teacher’s praise. Once in a classical literature class, the teacher posed a question on Robert Graves and I had the answer on the tip of my tongue. The teacher, a scholar of British Romanticism, looked at me and declared: there are some literary people in the class.

 

                                                                                         *******

Why I left academia?

 

Nah, it was not a sudden decision. Things have been leading towards that direction for quite some time and of course, there were immediate trigger events which hastened my decision.

I had to leave academia because I had no choice. Like hundreds every year, I was screened out of the job market and thereafter I found it impossible to continue in the profession. The meagre pay of a guest faculty position was not enough to make both ends meet. I applied to many institutions and colleges for a full-time position. Interviews followed and I came close but did not get any calls. The application process was gruesome – interviews were notified on websites and on the day of interview, the candidates would arrive two hours before the scheduled time and make a beeline in front of the office. Often a hundred candidates would vie for a single post. I presented myself in many such interviews – cut a sorry figure in some and in others, managed to impress the interviewers – but was unable to toe the line that separated the good from the bad.

One fine day, I decided to move on. After all, I could pursue my interest in books outside the academic structure as well. And yes, it was my love for books, specifically my passion for literature that drove me into academia years ago. As a starry-eyed teenager, I saw my verdant college campus as the perfect place to delve into the golden realms of literature. Later on I would re-enter the outside world as a man transformed by - as Wordsworth said - the strange seas of thought. At the university, I was surrounded by scholars who were generally well-meaning, although driven more by careerism than by the love for books. The defining time came when I realised that my love for literature had become a liability. The entire concept of literature has been discredited and brushed under the carpet. Once in an airless conference hall, the discussion turned to the necessity of promoting what is called low art (as opposed to high art), when a middle-aged professor declared with an air of adolescent superiority: there is nothing called art or literature. They are historically constructed.

[# If there is nothing called art, how does one talk about low art? How can one declare something and simultaneously claim that there is now way to measure it?]

 In literature departments today, the question of whether something called art and literature exists depends on the social groups in question. If it is the privileged groups, the existence of a specific type of writing called literature is categorically denied; but if it concerns a writer from the vulnerable social groups, it is assumed that there is something called art and literature. This line of argument, or aporia (to be precise) is based on the naive belief (akin to a second-class romanticism) that reading and researching literatures written by marginalised groups would somehow improve the living conditions of the oppressed and vulnerable people. Love for literature is therefore no longer the primary basis on which students and scholars are evaluated. Rather it is one’s political and ideological stand that distinguishes the good from the bad students.

In the faculty lounges and living quarters, in the street addas and late night revelries, what issues forth is envenomed rhetoric in the garb of academic research: Austen is an imperialist...The Mahabharata is nothing but the war cry of an advancing civilization...Raja Ravi Verma is a chauvinist. No matter how much I reasoned with the pundits, I found my voice lost in an endless cesspool of doctrinairism.

[At this point, it would be unfair if I don’t acknowledge a small circle of professors and research scholars who have bravely defied the normative demands of contemporary academic opinionatedness. I had the good fortune to learn a great deal from such old-school academics who are, I am afraid, on the verge of getting extinct.]

During the last couple of years, a topic often retailed in academic circles is the New Education Policy (NEP) 2020. Teachers and students often contest a simple point in the NEP – the hinging of education to the needs of the developmental state. Such yoking, says the silver-haired professor, reduces the university to a cog in a machine, whose function is pruned in order to churn out men and women who would staff the different departments of the government. What our silver-haired prof means is obvious and could be true – the NEP fails in its endeavour because it views the university as any other government department. But anyone who has been associated with a university knows that it is meant to be a place where young men and women seek their dreamy paths, forge identities and learn the merits of passive contemplation. The university is not meant to be used in an instrumental sense; rather it is supposed to be the breeding ground of ideas that would go on to transform our world.

Well, this seems to be a perfect line of argument. But I wish the same wisdom prevails among the academic community when it comes to the teaching of literature. Literature, if its existence is acknowledged at all, has been reduced to a means and end binary, an instrument through which one can learn about something else. Such instrumentalization of literature makes a mockery of the argument being given against the NEP’s vision of education as a means to an end. Do we have a moral ground to criticise others if we commit the same mistakes? Do we have the right to accuse others of what we ourselves are guilty of perpetrating? The NEP’s instrumentalizing of knowledge is but a spitting image of the academic community’s reductionist views of literature.

            I am fatigued. I haven’t read a good novel (forget poetry) in years. But the promise of literature beckons from a place that is unbounded by the academic straitjacket. The solution to the ills that plague literature departments (more generally, humanities and social sciences) is commonsense – the mere understanding of the difference between political awareness and indoctrination. But I resolve not to take the mantle as I have moved on to the interloper’s pleasure zone. I am a free man.  

Oh starry starry night… (Based on Anne Sexton’s “The Starry Night”)

 

The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh

There is no town but a girl from the town captures the poet’s attention.

The yellow and the blue befit the night’s singularity - cool and dark - the time when one rests his (or her) aching heels. But the night is a cauldron of hot water. One can get his fingers singed by the smoldering stars. It is the path to the hushed peace of death.

The serpent swallows the stars but is unseen. Death is concealed in the elaborate curves of life.

The stars move and so does the moon. Living forms exhort her: this is how I want to die.

The night is a dragon that would suck her up; nay, she won’t slip into death. She only splits from her life. Their paths might cross again.

Her urge to die does not dissipate in the immateriality of transient moods.

Her urge to die is not a solitary refrain lost in the incorporeality of contourlessness in a chaotic infinitude of unrestrained colours.

Her longing has truly dissolved itself into form.  

Looking at Amrita Sher-Gil's Mother India

Amrita Sher-Gil’s painting Mother India has received much acclaim but much of it is critical, meaning that critics have mostly interpreted her art through a socio-political lens. Sher-Gil’s critics state that art is always-already fraught with politics. But the learned critics miss a crucial point – politics is constituted by two different modes of thinking and doing and any political interpretation therefore should clarify the mode which the artwork affects. The two planes in which politics operate are -   

One – politics as a condition of life. Imagine the following situation. A person walks into a room and chooses to seat himself next to a particular person at the expense of another one. Such a choice is an everyday act that is based on the person’s preferences, likes, dislikes, tastes etc. which are mostly determined by his position in society. Everyday expressions of tastes/likes/dislikes are inevitably political because they reflect one’s position in society and economy. An interesting aspect of everyday human behavior is that it could be voluntary as well as involuntary. One can consciously develop a taste. His existing tastes, on the other hand, could be a function of his place in society and therefore independent of his control. This holds true for both the educated elite as well the illiterate masses. To live is make choices which are always embedded in a socio-political context. Therefore, politics in this conceptual framework is a condition of life itself.

Two – politics as a mode of organization/ association/party. Ideologically alike individuals form groups to influence public opinion and retail their respective beliefs. The end could be different for different groups. Some might seek to fight elections and capture power while others could stay away from the electoral process and operate through informal networks. But such political behavior is always voluntary.

While these two notions of politics are related, the notion of politics as a condition of life itself can exist independently of the second notion.

So to come back to the topic at hand, if Sher-Gil’s painting is political, it is in the first sense. While creating her art, Sher-Gil is simply fulfilling a condition of her life. The learned critics can very well leave her alone.

  

 

 

Life of Language and Language of Life

 

'The Uncertainty of the Poet,' Giorgio de Chirico

I slipped into a delicious languor…

Oh! You ought to be careful in the lockdown.

I mean I slumbered off in peace for a while.

Oh! Ok, the ‘delicious’ misled me.

The slipperiness and the unpredictability of language are but a metaphor for the whimsicality of life.  A cloud of uncertainty enshrouds human communication. One sticks to and abides by the self-assigned meaning of a word only to find that it does not mean what he had thought all the time. Mortification… Pause…The new meaning is the new normal. Life pulsates again. The old one is gone and dusted. After all, it was not meant to be. In the clutter and contingency of life, meaning arises and disappears and there is no sun around which it could revolve.

 

Written in the aftermath of the death of Mr Mohun Biswas

 

“[…] Then it was that he discovered the solace of Dickens. Without difficulty he transferred characters and settings to people and places he knew. In the grotesques of Dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary, and he was given strength to bear the most difficult part of his day: dressing in the morning, that daily affirmation of faith in oneself, which at times for him was almost like an act of sacrifice.”

                                   -  V. S Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas.

“Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.”
                                                                                      - V. S Naipaul, A Bend in the River.

                One afternoon I learnt that Mr Mohun Biswas, a journalist with the Trinidad Sentinel had died at his Sikkim Street house in Port of Spain. The news put me in a dilemma - a part of me wanted to reach the late journalist’s house without any delay but the other part made me hesitate and think. My indecision was perpetuated by the rain that had continued from the previous night. The rain intensified as I went out to the terrace and pulled the garbage bin towards the door, careful not to let the sheets of water hurtling down from the roof wet my body, especially my head. Newspapers stained with dal and curry, a comb with broken teeth and blackened orange skins spilled out on the drenched mosaic floor.

The cement wall that hemmed in the terrace was damp from the rain and through the window I could see a sparsely furnished room softly lit with a bulb. The dim light illumined the vague outlines of a bed, a study table and two chairs. A plastic sheet had been carefully placed over the table to protect the stack of books and files from the rain that seemed to leak through the roof riddled with holes.

After some time, I re-entered my room and discovered a wet patch on one side of the ceiling. It was the beginning of summer but the breeze of the fan made me shiver. My hand reached out towards the fan regulator when suddenly the lights went out. The darkness was near total and I paused for a while, unbolted the door, opened it slightly and in the weak glow of a distant streetlight, I could see the rain pounding on walls and treetops. The lanes and gutters inside the colony were overflowing with black water.

Mr Biswas survived an impossible deluge after he had moved to his one-room house near the barracks. The builder had barely nailed the tin sheets on the wooden frame when the rainstorm came. He made Anand recite a sloka from a Vedic text after the rains and the wind had blown away the roof of his house.

I vividly remembered the scene. Mr Biswas and Anand groped in the dark as the rain converged on the room. Outside in the yard, Anand found their dog dead - wet and petrified. The weather stupefied the father and son. They could only see the waters gushing through narrow depressions into the gutter outside in the street. Others who lived in the barracks were either asleep, oblivious to the storm or their wooden houses were sturdy enough to let them rest calmly when the storm raged outside. Their presence did not assure Mr Biswas. He thought they were deluding him.

Like my own neighbors who seemed not to be bothered about the deluge in the colony. They were ensconced in their tiny rooms. My neighbors did not seem to share my fears. It made me puny and defiant at the same time.

In the evening, the rains stopped for a while. I could hear movement outside in the street. There was a scuttling of feet and the clanking of pans. The shrill cry of a vendor pierced the pallid air. Men and women poured into the streets. There were small crowds outside general stores. People lumbered to buy necessities for the night. By seven o clock everyone in the colony was inside their rooms, surrounded by rations and whiskey and cigarettes and waiting for the storm.

They had correctly sensed the mood of the weather. After the lull, the rains returned with a hissing sound and scattered the few audacious men who had decided to stay out as long as possible. As I sat down on my bed, the honking of public buses on the arterial road across the colony came to me like foghorns in some distant harbour.

Like the harbour in Port of Spain where the ships rested after travelling half the world and replenished their supplies.

The city where Mr Mohun Biswas had lived and died.

I wanted to reach out to the family and friends of the late journalist and offer my condolences but simultaneously, an inner voice asked me if it would be the proper thing to do. I had admired the man but I did not know him. Gossips, rumors and novels were the substance out of which I had forged an image of Mr Biswas. I read many of his essays and weekend columns. I knew him through his writings on critical issues. I had scanned the literature on his life for words to articulate my own experiences. But so did many others. Moreover, there were so many other people who had known him personally. It would be better if I let them organize his funeral and memorials and prayers. Where would I fit in among the bereaved family and friends of late Mr Mohun Biswas? But even his sole biographer only knew him the way I did. They had never met in Trinidad or London. They had never actually met personally. But they shared the most intimate relationship. So my best course of action would be a further perusal of the biographer’s sketch of Mr Biswas’ life and works.

May sunflowers grow on Mr Biswas’ grave.

 

 

 

When lethargy stole over me…

 

 "There are tracts in my life that are bare and silent. They are the open spaces where my busy days had their light and air." 

                                                                              -    Stray Birds, Rabindranath Tagore 

“Fled is that music:--- Do I wake or sleep?”

-       “Ode to a Nightingale,” John Keats

How does one write about the nothingness and inactivity in the mind? How does one convert base metal into literary gold? Isn’t the use of metaphors proof that the mind is still active? Or is it the other way around? Are metaphors the proverbial last straw the person clutches to save himself from the bottomless pit of languorous passivity? But metaphors come and go. The mind soon slams the door on the face of the world and gives itself to sloth.

However, such passivity could also presuppose a laden mind, a mind assailed by waves of sensory input. Having reached the limit of its carrying capacity, the mind starts swaying. The sensory data that riddle the brain come in different ways. One is the drudgery of deadline-compulsion. Deadlines are signposts that structure our days and nights. They seem to follow each other with a metronomic regularity until the difference between metaphor and machine blurs and disappears. Writing too becomes a deadline.

Lethargy steals over in a minute. But one can see it coming. There is nothing left to do now – the mind insinuates and immediately sets into motion a spring of listlessness. So suggestions of completion combine with the lack of immediate goals to create a lethargic state of mind.

There are other ways of reaching such a mental state. Lethargy is a dilatory chamber which serves to freshen and awaken the mind. The person rushes towards a deadline and achieves it. But he is too fatigued to start a new assignment and so, lets his mind wander till he discovers that restraint is better than self-indulgence. Time lapses and the early-bird advantage is wasted. Things will be done on time, when their time comes and when I find time. No need to hurry and spill the milk. Let me chill. But the alarm bell chimes again. The last task this season has been delayed by err…wish I had immediately started working on the next task. But this is the nature of lethargy. It revels in delaying the swift-footed person. Strength abandons the hands and the head droops before swinging backwards till the eyes widen only to stare at the grime of the ceiling fan. The haunches upon the wooden chair hurt but I make no effort to ease the pain. Intent deserts the mind.

Soon the clamour begins anew. It is a bit late but I am at my efficient best and I look forward to completing the next round of tasks well ahead of the designated time. The mind is fresh after a slumber. Nay, this is not slumber. This is lethargy.

The tourist

 

                              [Image credit: Google]

                        (1)

Nothing changed between him and his wife

Yet the rumours spread about strife,

He could barely contain those malevolent lies

Which he wanted to smite like flies.

                       (2)

One day, all of a sudden

In a tongue feeble and olden

His wife asked him thus-

What is all this fuss?

Let’s forget the rumour-mongers and discuss

Ways to end this homely impasse.

I am giving you a palmful of nuts

Without ifs and buts

You down the fruitage

And you’ll gain the tongue of a sage

And in coming days

When you follow your instinctive ways

And visit quaint villages

Your tales will teach them how to survive on pillages

Notwithstanding your streaked teeth

They’ll take you to their heath.

                       (3)

There was a tourist who downed a betel nut

And fell into a conversational rut,

The many places where he has travelled

He never ruddy unravell'd.