Children collect things, I suppose mimicking and learning from their adults' behavior or propensity to hunt and gather. I also collected things when I was boy, going through the various stages or more appropriately collecting epidemics that seem to sweep over the whole populace of boys of a certain age. The first things I collected were the foils, both gold and silver, extracted from discarded packs of cigarettes, some after my father was done with (he smoked then, Gold Flake brand) and some after begging the corner-shack cigarette-seller, Ramu, to give up a few more when we were sent there on Sunday afternoons to buy half a pack or so of cigarette for the adults to indulge in a smoke or two after heavy lunch.

Soon afterwards in primary school, I accidentally stumbled upon the geological joys of a vast and wild rocks at school; more than fifty acres of rocky land for a curious doggish nose to sniff and go over, an unheard of luxury for an urban school, and I suppose my dumb luck that took me to it for a few sharp and joyous years. Soon my pencil box (made from sheet metal with sharp edges) always had pieces of rock in it: red hematite, a glinting volcanic piece of hard iron, layered mica pieces with their shining fish scales that you rubbed on your arms and face to get a feel of stardust, and then the pieces most sought of all, those hexahedral quartz crystals.

To extract these, one had to improvise a chisel and a hammer to knock them out of the surrounding duller rock. And often a time, since we couldn't find the right mining instruments or leisure for the expeditions were undertaken usually in lunch break after feeding the least favorite course to the stray dogs, we had to lug the whole largish boulders home, much to the exasperation and amusement of adults. This behavior now enables me to understand those fevers for gold, diamonds etc that seem to sweep over men, and take them out into far out places, for those quartz crystals were as desirable to me then as objects of beauty and value.

And as the seasons turned, other objects sought out our attentions: the late winter when in those tropics weather turned really glorious and livable, and after the North Eastern Monsoon, if it was beneficent and dropped some rain, the school wilds used to break out in these waves of tiny clustered wild flowers, and we used to run around in those fields of white, our writing pad reversed, stalking and chasing, beauties of wing and air, butterflies.

Usually we used to put these trapped butterflies in the pencil boxes, or if they were a little bigger in the lunch boxes and take them home with us, where after their pigments colored our finger trips, we used to release them.

However I remember one year when I set up a coop made of wire mesh in the weediest part of my backyard, about two feet square box, and transferred the butterflies from the box to the coop. And the next morning when I went out to monitor their domestication (the idea was to have these as pets), two were dead and two were hanging in one corner, lusterless and weary. Perhaps this was an object lesson for the young me on the limitations of art and artifice, and the requirements to keep untamed beauty flying free in and through the mysterious air. Other animal collections included two notable kinds of bugs; what we called velvet bugs (which a few weeks ago, during an intense discussion at midnight were actually revealed to be some kind of mites), and then antlions, those killing machines to who I fed fire ants. I will skip this bug anthology for now, for it is a whole remembrance in itself.

Then among the more inanimate collections...

to be continued...

You remember arriving at Toronto’s airport, and changing money. The surprise of finding Queen Elizabeth’s profile on the coins and bills. And then the recall of older histories twining this Britishness to the Pax Britannia legacy of India: expulsion of Komatu Maru’s Sikhs based on immigration policies dictated by the imperative to maintain the racial purity of the Canadian nation. Also the Jack London stories of fur trappers, lumber men and gold prospectors and scenes from Ondtaaje’s novels.

Yet Canada, when you stepped out of the airport glass doors, and rode a bus on the highways towards a train station felt like U.S.A, except of course for those highway markers subtitled in French. And the same flatness of the Great Plains, and the vegetation or the lack of it here; in the temperate zones as recalled from middle school geography; it was in Grade 4, you think, that you covered North America. However you could feel, perhaps in a psychological sense, feel the northern latitude. That was as far north as you had gotten so far, you with your tropical blood.

The few low and sparse trees you remember standing in the plain on either side of highway were still bare; this in the middle of May. And then the echoes of a Lisel Muller’s poem on riding with the spring, in the reverse direction, north to south, from Maine to Georgia, to find herself standing in the dense swampy shade of ash oaks in summer. The ways in which poetry is tied to memory, the ways in which it becomes a shorthand, a mnemonic device to enfold time in.

And soon the train with its linoleum floors, plastic seats, and cargo of faces of every kind (black, white, brown, yellow, human) carried you to the city center. You were spending the night at the Youth Hostel, off King Street, which sat of course next to the Queen Street. Downtown Toronto had a kind of tentative newness when compared to New York City of the previous few days. You later read that most of these water front streets adjoining Lake Ontario were once occupied by dowdy warehouses and factories. Then all those buildings of steel and glass must have been of recent manifestation, recent giant tombstones.

Yet, what struck you most about Toronto streets were not these structures of steel and glass but the silence, and the absolute absence of people vis-¨¤-vis the frenetic madness of New York City streets. And this on a Thursday evening. It was as if you had accidentally arrived in a theatre all too soon, and were seated with few others before the curtain opened and something happened on stage ¨C till then the all too loudness of your breath. Perhaps this is the loneliness and loathing that you have read veteran travelers like Paul Theroux and Pico Iyer write about.

After dumping the bags over your bunk bed, you picked up a map and headed out to the water, past the railroad station, past the giant indoor stadium where ice hockey is probably played, past the pack of bums who kept darting in and out of the traffic at red lights with upturned hats for drinking money, ducking under the expressway, down to the lakefront, which is nearly silent and deserted. You wondered if your arrival was taken as the herald of the plague, and if the citizenry had evacuated in advance, leaving behind a few stragglers, wrapped in woolens against the breeze coming of the bay?

A mile or so from where you sat, your face shifting in the lake water as setting sun glinted off it, there was an island; you could see houses standing amidst clumps of tree branches; a different kind of sparsity there, of landscape, of people. Eye tracking the sunlight falling obliquely over the glass gravestones, which too were set wide apart, all along the water front, as if to cover all the expanse of naked space, as if land there was still to be had for taking. And the needle of the CN Tower imperceptibly revolving about its axis. A lyric from Gulzar came to you then; about a revolving restaurant high up, 60th or 70th floor, and one pair of hands enveloping others' as if they were two purses secreting away two stalks of maize for the winter.

And then soon enough darkness began to fall. Evening hours can be the loneliest hours, especially if you are a stranger in a strange and seemingly deserted city. You got up, zipping up your rain jacket against the coolness of the night; an eighteen degree centigrade May evening, unimaginable in the tropics. A long walk along the waterfront, through blocks of newly built condominiums, through new construction sites, through the touristy attractions of faux gondola and sail ship rides; shore birds there, you couldn't identify any of them, until you leaned over the railing to greet some mallard ducks, and shivered imperceptibly.

For there in the garbage that collects at the edge of any urban water body, a pure white swan, its neck bend in pure repose. Proving something? That occasions of beauty shine through even the bleak hours, and startle open the eyes? You remember the silence then, on the quay; and this image of you, the lone human for half a mile or so on the lakefront, joining with the that of Leda, already full in being, in those polluted waters of Lake Ontario.

to be continued...

Today's New York Times has an excellent article on an upcoming reterospective of GBS's work at the New York Public Library (a beautiful beautiful place that one should spend a day or two in when visiting New York City).

While I can't exactly remember what of GBS I may have consumed, given that I haven't been much of a reader of plays (sometimes I think, these days, I have become more of a watcher/ gossip hound/ groupie of literary world/ business vs. the serious consumer/ orgy-ist of literary products that I was when I was say 18 or 19 years old, and that is definately a bad thing! A. H, I need your help quick! ), I surely think GBS ain't as great as Shakespeare (an echo from that Harold Bloom's Bard-alotary tome, the one who 'invented human') inspite of this:

...He was impatient with the man who he conceded was the greatest English playwright after himself. "The truth is," he wrote, "the world was to Shakespeare a great 'stage of fools' on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living." Shakespeare's pessimism, he concluded disapprovingly, "is only his wounded humanity."...

Other tarty tidbits:

... The American, described the play (Mrs. Warren's Profession) as "illuminated gangrene." ...

.. Shaw regarded the sexual vitality of women - nature's vehicles, after all, for passing on the life force - with a mix of adoration and terror that made them monumental. ...(yes yes like that greek myth - I forget which exactly - women are capable of immensely larger sexual pleasure)

Meanwhile, Uncle Pankaj Mishra takes down Uncle Salman Rushdie's Shalimar a peg or two, in another of his too delicately intellectual, James-ian sounding reviews (I think he had already kicked Rushdie before for infecting 'Indian Writing in English' with the disease of Rushdieitis, with its maniacal neo-magic realistic prose) at NYRB. And having had Uncle Rushdie read from a draft of this novel (the episode of Shalimar and Booyni doing it in paradisical Kashmir read like bad bad Bollywood kitsch: think of quasi-sex, i.e., shaking bushes or bees sucking from flowers in the middle of a syrupy love song), when he lectured here a year ago, I think I surely don't want to walk the tight rope with Shalimar any time soon.

Meanwhile Uncle Vikram Seth came out with his latest book, this time a memoir, called 'Two Lives'. And just because I like Seth (I owe him a huge debt for showing me, a bumbling Indian kid, what can be done using English via the mad novel in verse, 'The Golden Gate'), I think I will try to look this book up sometime soon.

Also this book, Persian Fire, sounded interesting. An interesting historical novel would be to write a story of the Persian- Greek wars from the view point of a Persian, perhaps someone who is the witness to Alexander's sacking of the Xerxes's capital.

Also if testify doesn't come from holding one's balls while making an oath, where does it come from then? I must, must find $1000, and get me the O.E.D quick!