After Anand emailed to me to say that Jugni was not translated by him, and that he had just taken the English version from the linear notes of Shergill's album, my thoughts turned to the 1984 Sikh massacre (riot is a term that means more than simple large scale murder of one community by a somewhat, perhaps, different community), and what personal memories I may have of that nascent period of the self.

The first thing I think I remember from that time is Appu, that jolly baby elephant mascot of the 1982 Asian Games (Also picture of real Appu who apparently died!!!). This was right around when Doordarshan (pronounced Duur) or DD for short, brought the devil of TV to the Indian masses. Admittedly TV was still a benign devil then, with a grand choice of one scratchy TV channel, in black & white, broadcast from that remote capital of India, Delhi, from around 7 to 11 in the evenings, around which the semi-rural provincial families like mine, in this lead by my TV addicted sister, attended to, with some degree of awe and wonder. (Also something from a dialogue in a movie "Before Sunset" last night, in which Celine, the female lead, reminisces about a trip to Communist Warsaw, and the effects that media freeze - no billboards, no ads, no news media other than Party propaganda - had on her imagination and its encounters with itself)

As a further aside, I think someone - Anand, the historian, willya dude? - should take up the challenging task of leading an archeological dig into, and then archive, these DD memories of the Indian Baby Boomer Generation to which I, and many Indians of my generation, belong to. My DD memories, in no particular order, would consist of various TV ads: Lux Beauty Soap, Cinkara Syrup, Bru Filter Coffee, Three Roses Tea, Rin Detergent Soap etc, and TV soaps or serials: those goofy special effect arrows in the kitschy battles of Ramayana, which definitely had better special effects vis-a-vis Mahabharata - the great Indian (I purposefully avoided writing Hindu) Epics made into Sunday morning TV soaps; those wonderful R.K. Laxman's cartoons and the accompanying title music of Malgudi Days.

Yet going back to 1984, what do I remember of that time? I would like to think that I do remember the Golden Temple with the Granth Sahib wafting in the air, in Amritsar, turned into a battle zone with tanks and field artillery, its domes cracked up like egg shells. I would like to think that I do remember the news of Indira Gandhi, the then Indian Prime Minister, being shot at by her Sikh bodyguards coming over the All India Radio that morning, and her subsequent death later in the afternoon reported on a live telecast.

I would also like to think that I remember her grand funeral - corpse carried on the gun carriage, and her body lying on a stack of sandalwood - this sandalwood business really boggled my mind the most, in that how can those damned fools use so much fragrant sandalwood to burn a body. Rats! And don't I also remember that glass cage around the stain of blood where Gandhi's body had hit the ground.

But of that subsequent large scale Sikh massacre I have no, even assumed or approximate, memory. What happened? How can there be this blank spot in my head? Is this because this was before I started reading newspapers, and these massacres were whitewashed away by the government controlled TV? Is this because living in a city that was far removed from Delhi, my life had never personally crossed with anyone else's changed or shattered by that year?

Or is this because those other memories were strengthened by watching reruns in the media of those former events; when the Indian Army was sent back into the Golden Temple complex a few years later (was this Operation Blue Star? Or Red Star? Or Death Star?), or when Indira's son Rajiv was done away by a bomb strapped to a human body?

What about massacres someone asks inside of me? It's hard to keep track of them another replies. They all seem to blend into one single blob of blood in the killing fields of recent history, of collective memory as claimed and understood by this self. Those various riots spread across years, in the Old City of Hyderabad, centered around the Charminar - which I saw more often on cigarette packages than for real, for wasn't that a place where a conflagration could start any minute? - filtering through to the edge where we lived, like bad dreams that happen only elsewhere, to someone else, as a happy and welcomed closure of schools.

And during a particular tense period of motorcycle bound knifings, staying close to home after dark, taking large detours and using alternative routes to go around Moula Ali, that nest of the viperous other - the Attar Sahib, the perfumed Muslim, perfumed because popular provincial lore had it that "they" didn't bathe regularly like "us", i.e. the Hindus, and thus used perfume to mask the body odor. Also vehement denials and chafing at the teasing and ribbing by cousins from the Costal Andhra Belt, which was relatively "Muslim free", on our use of Hyderabadi Telugu, "infected" as they claimed with Urdu, that language of the Attar Sahib, the other, a graceful language of Ghalib and Faiz that I now regret for not learning or knowing.

How then to reconcile such disunities (borrowing from Agha Shahid Ali's terminology for the Ghazal) within, to understand the shadows of historical time I have lived under, the histories that I have lived through, and to which I was mostly blind to? Reading William Darylymple The White Mughals to discover Moula Ali as something more than a black granite hillock a mile or so away, good for climbing in school vacations, but also as a site for a large scale multi religious "urs" (or festival), a rock which both the Hindu and the Muslim women climb to petition Inman Ali's footprint for children? Or an Kushwant Singh's article on the Gadhar movement, centered in the 1920s Californian Sikh community, and its role in the Indian anti-imperialist project?

Sat Sri Akal!

It has been raining in these southern latitudes of this sprawling country for two days now, where I have found myself stranded for half a decade - the fifth year was completed yesterday, August 8. This remembrance of dates came to me quite suddenly, as I was reading Anand's translation of Jugni from Punjabi:

Jugni blazed into Delhi, Where she forgot, in the crowd, Where she came from and where she was going All was forgotten...

When she came to her senses Her time was up

The cancellation of dates, and the erosive habits of this river of time. I wander through the blog world, to pick up words on my tongue, and to attempt remembrance of a country that has become this memory of a certain smell of rain. And I realize I can't evoke this with the same immediacy or sharpness as once I could. So is all lost, and must be found again?

Also, as I have been told, with a certain undercurrent of accusation amidst gentle ribbing by a certain little friend (who is now herself, negotiating that 'foreign' city known as London) about my changed, and changing English accent (a root that now has become a rout when I deliver talks on truck deliveries, and I always think of how we mocked and mimicked a professor with an American PhD, who did this those many years ago in India), perhaps I have after all mutated into a firangi, the foreigner, swimming - butterfly stroke and half drowning, through all these years.

The face in the mirror answers to my interrogation only with the hair lost on the upper lip, and the thinning forest of the scalp. Also more lines around the jaw, and on the forehead. And eyes like fossilized amber, reflecting certain foolish imported day dreams and illusions that appropriately died, as well as now transmitting light through a certain self-consciousness of the self, a certain lens, perhaps writerly, through which to look at the world, which is both within and without, and that keeps brimming with amusement and sadness.

Or since A.H asked me, through her poem this morning:

Hobby

Third, that he is a crow finding a bun corner left in the rain, or a dead squirrel with eye unplucked. He sorts our detritus with the patience we didn't have, redeeming what can be. As he moves on to the next receptacle, adjusting his pipe and shaking his giant plastic maraca to settle the cans I think I hear him hum.

am I just this, a crow, a bum who feels much older than the one who preceded him by half a decade, a scavenger of memory?

With that borrowed title, and a strong exhortation by Uber, the Joyceian, to hold forth on my bookish perversities in exchange for a lifetime of free psychoanalysis on email and instant messenger, I jump into this archeological dig on books:

Total number of books I own:

Extending that Borgesian notion that a poem doesn’t really exist until a reader reads it, to the notion that the real ownership of a book happens only at the instant a reader consumes it, and that ownership is a moot & trivial issue otherwise, I would prefer to invoke the total number of books I can, if I am so inclined, beg and borrow, to read: something in the range of couple of million volumes held by the libraries at Georgia Tech, Emory University, and the Dekalb County Library System. Praise the Lord!

However if anyone of you does dare to pay me a visit in my squalid (in A.H’s opinion) sub-cave, you would find books numbering, perhaps a few hundred, arrayed in these continually morphing leaning towers, three book shelves, my large bed, the beside table, under the bed, on the floor etc.

Given this general architecture of my modest library at home, a variation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle seem to always hold, in that I can’t seem match, without exertion of effort, simultaneously the position of a certain book and my desire to look something up from it. For example before writing this, I wanted to find, and quote from, Borges’s Collected Non Fictions with foreseeable results. Thus you, kind reader, had to put up with my unreliable memory for quotes.

Last books I bought:

A few hours ago, for real cheap, i.e., by paying $ 4.75, I bought the following:

Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light ~ Leonard Shalin Do Fish Drink Water? : Puzzling and Improbable Questions and Answers ~ Bill McLain Blood & Guts: A Short History of Medicine ~ Roy Porter For Two Nights Only ~ Tom Holt (a Monty Pythonesque comedy; nights with the silent K, say nee!)

The last book I read:

Extending that to last few books I read, since I have fallen into this bad habit of grazing simultaneous from numerous volumes (here the eye grows misty thinking of those distant college night when a book, for example Vikram Seth’s brick ‘A Suitable Boy’, could get undivided attention from the self until it is finished) they are:

In the Skin of a Lion ~ Michel Ondaatje (a novel set in the immigrant slums of Toronto, the loves of a man and two women, and also a young girl and a thief who later show up elsewhere: in that haunted Italian villa)

Moments of Reprieve~ Primo Levi (more recollections by this graceful master, of those radiant moments he experienced among the barbed wire of Auschwitz)

Chinamen ~ Maxine Hong Kingston (a chautauqua mixing fact, fable and memory on the chinamen of her family)

Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White ~ Frank H. Wu (readings towards self investigations on identity)

Strangers from A Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans ~ Ronald Takaki (background research towards that grandly titled novelistic enterprise,The Blank Slate)

Books I am currently reading:

Selected Poems ~ Octavio Paz (journeys between the twin poles of love and politics, between the constant erotic and the restless landscape)

Selected Poems ~ Galway Kinnell

Self Interviews ~ James Dickey (free style talks by the original barnstormer for poetry)

Itinerary: An Intellectual Journey ~ Octavio Paz (the closest Paz came to autobiography)

Photography Speaks – 150 Photographers on their art ~ Brooks Johnson (ed) (eye candy, and a place to rest the word weary eyes)

First memory of a book:

These must be various comics (long live Uncle Pai! praise Tinkle, Indarajal comics etc!) I had avidly consumed in primary school, in that measly one-hour weekly “Library” period at the school library, as well as those borrowed from the lending library on summer mornings, here again sadly limited to only one meager comic a day. Perhaps such early limitations were the precursors of this latter day piggish greed for print?

Five books that mean a lot to me:

Here again, I would like to reformulate this sub heading as things that have significantly expanded the limits of my self-consciousness:

The Hindu [that quintessential daily newspaper out of Madras, redolent of filter coffee, idili sambar, and bearing news in that C. Rajagopalachari’s grandfatherly type of English (a result of mixing Queen’s finest with Tamil Brahmin ritualism?), which educated me in the voodoo secrets of the English language. I used to read it from top to bottom, all the classifieds included, every afternoon after borrowing it from our neighbor lady, in those long years of primary school, in the beginning hardly cognizant of most of the secret symbols of a language that was yet to become my own]

Swami and Friends ~ R.K. Narayan [this was first complete, i.e., unabridged and simplified, English novel I read, circa 1989, when I was eleven years old, from a copy bought from Wheeler’s, and given to me by my father on the platform of Vishakapatnam railway station. And since one needs comforting throughout, even after on claims to have grown up, this book made the journey across the blackwater in my carryon case, into this voluntary exile. It is also the oldest book, ownership wise, in my modest library, and is now held with a rubber band between two pieces of cardboard. Also less said about the virtues of such deeply sentimental books, the better it is!]

The Golden Gate ~ Vikram Seth [first encountered in that sparsely populated literary section, banished to a dungeon like lightless room of the Central Library (C.L) at my alma mater, this novel sung in tetrameter and sonnet, was a mindfuck, and without doubt changed my notions of what can be done with the English language. It was also important because encountering Seth was the dim spark that lit this vague hunger for writerly heaven within the self. Also if what one reads and imagines is what one mimics many years later in life, then I seem to have followed Mr. Seth’s route – a sickly PhD, that curly marsh of deltas, that waxes and wanes, and this consumptive passion for poetry]

Lust for Life ~ Irving Stone [there was a life before I knew anything about Vincent Van Gogh (and art in general), and there is this illuminated life afterwards]

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character ~ Richard P. Feynman [a hero of mine, even though I don’t understand a jack of his Nobel Prize winning theories in theoretical physics (this in spite of heroic efforts of K3 to initiate and enlighten me) talked these superb, and deeply playful, memoirs into existence. I would be happy, if I could tell one such tale on the way out of here, if not leave behind a mountain of significant work]

Books I am looking forward to consume:

Hannah Coulter ~ Wendell Berry [I shall be buying this recent novel soon, for Berry is, perhaps, the only contemporary American novelist for whose work I care to shell out dead presidents. Also the world will be a far better place if more people get acquainted with his Port William membership]

Convergences: Essays on Art & Literature ~ Octavio Paz [The kind librarian lady, at the Toco Hills Branch of the Dekalb Library System, has already retrieved this volume for me. The first essay by the maestro is on poetry and translation. Yippee!]

Books that you think are underrated / overrated:

I haven’t read enough yet, to make such pronouncements.

Also I have to think , to whom I should pass on this disease next...