On cleaning a house and moving, I discover fragments of my past, in hidden photographs and letters. I try to bring up memories and instead what comes up is a mixture of wistfulness and incredulity at my own recklessness, or was it stupidity, about a woman. It is stray things that remain in the aftermaths, like pieces of colorful cloth stuck on the barbed wire fences of times through which one had accidentally struggled to go through, and if lucky found himself alive and not strangled!

This morning it was a date like that, August 17, T was telling me it was his sister’s birthday and it came up that it was her birthday too. Strange coincidences and stranger that I should still remember, more than two years later. Memory is the silt of the slow moving river, of life, the river into which she had waded in four years ago. For what? To save herself from the vast loneliness of the human soul? Because of fascination for those strange waters of words that finally overwhelmed her reticence with the force of passion at their command? The river needed her too, like a she-fish, a bauble, a glint, something to capture the sun striking its surface and take that to the dark bottom, where danger and oblivion existed. But then the river was too wild for her untested fins, her gills too unfamiliar with the required technique of breathing. So she had to go to the bank, rise up and walk away. Another land swallowed her and then perhaps enabled her to evolve.

And what does the river remember? Faint ripples that remained in its consciousness like patterns in the subterranean silt of memory, perhaps altered by time but still hinged to a certain matrix of clues like that date, August 17, I remembered again this morning.

Books

I picked up two books today at the book fair, one a book of letters exchanged by Jack Kerouac and a woman called Joyce Johnson and the other a book of essays by Nadine Goodmier, the South African Nobel Laureate. The book of letters should prove interesting. I had been fascinated with the Beats at some point of time previously and then read them in copious amount. Kerouac’s “On The Road” still stands as a classic manifesto for freedom. However I found myself rethinking my view of the Beats (perhaps because of the years and experiences which have since ringed my bones) from being benign good natured goofballs who wanted to change the world to people who were also seriously disturbed. Is this perhaps because one element required of any revolutionary is to be unbalanced in some sense?

Speaking of Beats I also discovered a few letters in the process of moving belongings, from a girl who was the craziest child-woman I knew at that point. She was like that, a little unbalanced but full of life and then full of as much despair. This must be the cycle of destruction and creation, to create something has to be destructed. To write a poem, a thought, a memory, an observation has to be destructed as the poet trusses it up in words and shrouds that sacrificial body with a blank sheet of paper! I should know, after all I have been named after Shiva, the dancer of Tandava, the dance of destruction. Another thing that happened was I finally bought and got my copy of Octavio Paz’s “In The Light of India” in the mail. What a delightful book! He dissects the various masks that India wears and manages to throw light on aspects of India, that I have lived through and grew up in for 22 years and in some ways still live with, in startling ways. It is as if India is this intense beam of light that Paz had split with his brilliant prism of sensibility into a multitude of sights, smells, histories, tales, places, musical notes, waves and people.

Even though he claims to have not written a scholarly book on India and that much of India will remain hidden from his sight, I am still amazed by how much he managed (much more than I have!) to see and synthesize in his essays on topics ranging from the questions of poetry and language(s), the cuisine (how Indian cuisine is a polyphonic experience, like Indian classical music, where many tastes are synthesized on a thali or a plate vs. the western cuisine of sequence and courses!), religions (origins, conflict between Hinduism and Islam which sadly still rages, their influence on nationhood and modern politics). Too much to summarize here, how does one capture or discuss an exploding mind grenade, tres impossible!

Music

Last night I went to see, “we want the funk” George Clinton and the Funkadelic. Man! I absolutely dug that shit. At the best of moments that music offered transcendence and the worst of the times, very few, it became noise. The set began with an extended guitar jam with about five guitarists on stage. As an aside the Funkadelic were more like an traveling circus or an ensemble, with about seven guitars, two saxophones, two clarinets, seven or eight vocalists, dancers, comedy characters, goof balls what have you!