Recalled Ecology Of A Childhood
[A]
Adrienne[1], this was the limited landscape
in which the proscribed years of my childhood
took shape. And in it I am racing again a bicycle
of iron through the puddles after August rains.
The years between - where and what I have been - I would like to forget, sandwiched between the twin aromas of dust, and corncobs on charcoal gnawed on under the last amaltas' bloom.
You ask me to tell you what this abused landscape means after these many years? I can only invoke inaccurate memory to answer instead of pointing to emerald rice fields, mango orchards, and scrub land all plowed under.
[B] We sit in the dark having this conversation; my early gift of aromatic candles are still a standing joke here. Shall I speak of the nights when the moon on the rooftop was as real as the mythical gift giver in that infant lullaby?
Listen. A raga - Kedar - on the radio. I never listened to this music as much when I was here. Yet now, how these half-heard notes unpack these stark hillocks, alleys with madcap saints buried at their corners, and lioness eyes of these ocher women when I walk in your cities.
You say I grow strange and distant at times when we are dozing in each others arms. Yet believe me when I say I need your hands on my spine as the buffaloes we saw need those white egrets. And hours with you are long green streaks of parrots flying home.
[1] An imaginary presence to whom many of my imaginary monologues are addressed
My Poems
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Anarchophobia
Yesterday, after having successfully overcome the minimal fatigue of traveling to India, I ventured out into the functioning anarchy that this city (Hyderabad) has become in the last decade. And if "madness" was my constant chant on a short trip a few years ago as I was taken on a short whirlwind shopping trip into the center of the city, "nightmare" is perhaps a more accurate descriptor for the situation I found myself yesterday on my short excursion into the city.
It appears to me that Indian cities, which never were the most functional places on the face of the planet to begin with, are in the process of choking themselves to death as they race up the consumerist ladder. Multiplexes and American style malls won't push the needle far enough on the happiness scale (assuming that stuff sold in these places, in the first place, results in higher levels of "lifestyle satisfaction") when one is slowly asphyxiated caught in a traffic jam, which can, perhaps, be used as a model for the primordial universe after Big Bang.
I admit I was never a big city person, having grown up on what was then the rural fringe of this city (it was three or four times as small two decades ago), and having had the luck to go to a college that was located in the heart of rural Bengal(even if it was heart of darkness in another sense; pure Mahasweta Devi country outside the gated walls where many shiny - and some brilliant - engineers were minted for the "global" economy) , far away from the "temptations of the West" (yet always evoking in one this desire to migrate to the West). And then West, with its relatively higher degree of order, happened. Which is why, I, "the softie" (as my sister labeled me), had to curl up into a ball, and sleep for many hours, when I returned from that excursion in central Hydera-"bada" (Telugu for pain or suffering).
A tropical thunderstorm last night, and happiness on tracking an uptick in the availability of books (I bought four book for which my Jersey garret really doesn't have room - one of these - The Oxford Ghalib - I am planning to read and leave behind here) has put me in a slightly more agreeable frame of mind, towards this childhood city of mine, this morning.
Onto other cyber-excursions into built environment s (sewers & water systems): this post lead me to this great blog (and this post on it), and which lead me to look <a this old New Yorker article up - fascinating.
And oh, this might be one survival strategy if you have the dough in India.
My Daily Notes
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