I begin to write this after reading a few lines of an essay a piece that extolls "To write till I drop". That sentence connects me with what a friend of mine told me recently, of dancing in a all day and night long dance marathon for five hundred dollars she needed very desperately as she was scraping through school in upstate New York. It was a strange narrative and in the hands of a writer like Chekov could be turned into a sad short story with a giggle on the surface. And I would like to think that comes from strong Russian vodka and stronger Russian winters, neither of which I have experienced.

But then what are experiences? Aren't they thoughts that remain rotating in our heads, of reality once held and dropped, left behind or done? So if an experience is a thought, I would like to think that my thoughts of Russian winters never endured or Russian vodka never drunk to be some kind of pesudo experiences too. The only failing perhaps is the lack of a domain which exists or exisisted to map this expriences from to corresponding sensations. For me, for example Russian experience consists of a medely of world created by Chekov narratives of a necessarily degenerate Russian nobility and an equally destitue world of serfs, roubles, somovars, kopecks threaded with Tolstoy's epics, incantations of Sholokhov for the river Don, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago's Serbia where a candle burnt all night as the snow was falling and Stalinist labour camps of Solzhenitsyn where death was arbitrary and love grew like vines covering walls of a strange house.

Thus I traveled in my mind to all these places, thanks to subsidized Soviet books. A finely bound book that would cost here in the US, fifty dollars, thanks to Soviet largesse sold for a couple of rupees(a couple of cents). And whenever this moving pseudo propaganda bookstore setup in a bus used to visit us, my father used to take me and my sister to where this bus would be parked usually on the roadside. While my sister, who was and still is fascinated by picture books, used to head down to that section, not a section really, but a corner of the bus, I used to pick up heavy tomes( I think they were mostly State approved views on philosophy and art) and see if I could understand anything in them. In such ignorance I for some reason, maybe it was the quasi leather binding, made my father buy me Chekov, a volume of his short stories. It was to be some time before I could understand that adult world and the craziness that goes with that. In the mean time I was saved by a story book that I managed to get too. It was a story of good and evil set on a collective farm in Khazakasthan(I think). It was a fine tale of childhood bravery and good versus evil much like Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys. Only these kids weren't travelling around the world like "capitalistic comrades" but were "collectively" building a gymnasium for their school.

For a boy living in what was almost a village, in lower middle class India it didn't matter, for where the action was. It could be Drew's Macchu Picchu, Tintin and Capn Haddock's Arabia trip in the Land of Black Gold or Twain's Tom Sawyer swimming with Huck in the Mississipi.National Geographics were also greedily devoured as I still devour them when ever a new issue finds it's way to my post box. In the mean time, yes time always passes, I grew up. The local landscape changed, gone were the huge mounds of fine white sand in which I constructed elaborate forts and played Nazis vs SAS. In their place were houses with people I didn't know. For those who know me this is an old lament, but the feeling that makes me repeat the lament is no less real. Then as someone told me, maybe I should shutup and get on with it and accept change even if change necessarily is not a good thing.

It's a strange thing, how we come to be dependent on the landscapes we grew up in as if landscapes hold an element of comfort for us. That's why when we move into a new house, which happens more often in an increasingly transitory world, it takes us time to settle down, to discover the rythms of the place and to keep on living. I have experienced this a few times, in some places I could never discover my rythms, via the place and most importantly the people there. Where I could, even if I was not terribly happy, I didn't have an element of discontent lodged in my mind. And where I didn't eventually I had pack my things and leave for good without any sense of having lived there or of having belonged to that place. But this is not entirely true for if one is observent, even a place in passing leaves definite impressions.

Recently I heard from a friend who wrote, in Bombay it had been raining continously, big fat drops. I lived in Bombay very fleetingly, stuck in a job I detested and a continent away from the woman who was then in my life. But still that sentence brought back memories of that July in Bombay. Of watching monsoon clouds drift in from the Arabian sea, still smelling salty, running into the Western Ghats which ring the city and falling down as rain. After a real heavy rain, in the distance water used to fall down from the hills in sheer ribbons of silver and in my ears I could hear the imaginary roar of the sea. It made me remember the evening, the only evening I spent in Bombay city, on the sea wall at Marine Drive as rain was falling. And all around me milled crowds buying cheap snacks, lovers holding hands, old men trying to avoid street urchins, umbrellas overturning in the rain, craning the neck up and staring at the line of skyscrapers, wondering at all the rich people who lived in those sea facing apartments. The last I read Bombay's downtown was the second costliest piece of real estate in the world closely following Tokyo. I remember pretty girls, dressed in bustiers, stuff which for me till that day, only exsisted in fashion magazines or movie tabliods, walking provocatively jiggling their belly buttons. A single line written out of context can bring back so many memories of a place lived in, even if only fleetingly.

It has been more than an hour I have been writing and my fingers are freezing thanks to air conditioning turned on to polar temperatures. Since I don't know what the theme of this piece is, so will posit it as another random rambling