Seated across a table, on one of the outside patios of a café, he listens to Z talk, which Z occasionally breaks off to take a drag from the cigarette smoldering in an ashtray, a coal on a spring day, the smell that stays in one’s hair. There is no method in Z’s talk. People rapidly enter and leave the stage of his mouth.

Who is P? Who is D? P’s cousin? L’s aunt? Lover? Where did he meet these people? In which city? How? What was it exactly that passed between you and P, and D? It doesn’t make sense. Why are you telling me this? But he doesn’t raise any of these questions or objections as Z’s continues to drone on, coaxing out the menagerie of creatures who live in the traveling circus of his head, which is also memory, which is also the past, and which is where talk, which is idle gossip often circles back to.

He is meanwhile thinking of others. Grandmother with the skin that always smelt of pharmaceuticals, tablets for a weak heart, the warmth as he lay next to her, listening to her talk in this language from which he is now estranged, this language he cannot tell those stories he heard, without asking too many questions, of saints she saw covered with snakes, cobras, deep in meditation, of burning hay, of burning brick, songs of peasant revolutions, armbands of blood, prison visits, death of a son by suicide.

This segues with talk from a latter time, argument with a fellow student, his finger emphatically jabbing at the shacks lining the roads to demonstrate impoverishment, the ash of first renaissance of that country falling from the sky, and covering everything with a coat of soot and decay, to demonstrate how syllables from those first modernist poems, novels, and plays broke off their moorings and dashed against bodies traveling on the top of tin can buses, eyeing them both, sitting outside a ramshackle tea shack, with the knowledge of hunger.

All this in another country, that it itself has morphed from landscape into an abstract character that he occasionally asks travelers, people with the leisure and money, he meets, to drop by if they are in the vicinity. And when he speaks about this it appears to him that all these other people, who once populated his world, with whom he once broke bread and drank cheap liquor, have been absorbed into this pastiche, which what is this physical country he had set out from, is in his consciousness.

That is why he purposefully avoids books, novels or histories set or referring to this other, whose undercurrents still lap at his sleep. He laughs at Z’s accent, who is now speaking ghetto style, black talk, mimicking and making up rap rhymes. Songs sold on CDs wrapped in cellophane, anger, and angst, and millions of dollars, and women provocateurs as video props. And in befuddlement, subjects of caricature and this laughter.

Station Awareness

[1] My first awareness of the otherness, I suppose, arrived one summer afternoon (I now forget how old I was exactly, all I am sure about is that when this happened I was still in primary school) in the form of a shiny white Ambassador car, which pulled into the lane at whose end stood the house (thatched with straw, and with no plumbing) of my parental grandparents. I was spending the vacation between school terms, with my cousins, uncles, and aunts in that village, which was (and is) not much different from any others in the vicinity.

It is located some two hundred miles away from the city, where my parents have migrated to, with whatever education they could afford to get, seeking and finding good and steady employment. Our family was then situated somewhere between the lower and middle-middle class, or to use the bureaucratic acronyms of housing development boards that partitioned farm land into suburban colonies, somewhere in the LIG (lower income group) or the MIG (middle income group, and in my boyhood phase of militaristic obsession, this also stood for a Russian fighter plane that was the mainstay of Indian Air Force).

Into this physical and psychological milieu of a reasonably comfortable childhood, the two young men who disembarked from that car appeared as almost young gods. I don’t remember very vividly what they wore exactly, apart from striped t-shirts, jeans and shoes. They had big earnest smiles, and spoke in English, very quickly and confidently, in a thick American accent. My aunt, my father’s cousin, and the mother of these young gods, had to translate what they were saying, into our mother tongue for all of us (I, my grandparents, aunts etc) who were gathered in that front room, which also doubled as the bedroom and the dining room. Yes, so these young men were my distant cousins, who were born in U.S.A and lived there, and who were visiting India.

I don’t recall the contents of that conversation (I suppose there were the usual introductions, which would no doubt wouldn’t have meant much for those young men, who were no doubt subjects to many such introductions in the recent days by their mom) except that one of these young men had asked for a slice of an onion, as he sat there eating a late lunch. Much to my shame (I was going to an ‘English medium’ school, used English to speak with my teachers, and my grandmother prided in telling other villagers this fact about her oldest grandchild), I didn’t know what an onion was till my aunt translated it for us. So it was with this sense of shame of not knowing what the word ‘onion’ meant, that awareness of another world, which lay beyond the world I was then a part of, arrived.

[2] I suppose that this was also a concrete lesson in geography, which no doubt bought with it a sense of lack, a sense of limitations of the world I was born into. This awareness persisted, if only in a mild form, through out my childhood. I was also undoubtedly envious of some of my classmates (usually children of officers in the Indian Armed Forces) who had traveled and lived in distant and exotic cities all around the country. This kind of envy was mostly sublimated via petty academic rivalry, and jockeying for being a teacher’s pet student. However I do remember very vividly how this envy once spilled over into pilferage.

There was a pretty girl (she was ‘fair’, a semi-racist Indian euphemism for being light skinned and quite sophisticated) who traveled in the school bus with me, and who at that point of time showed up a Swiss pencil sharpener shaped liked a motorcycle helmet. The glassy helmet held the wood shaving after one sharpened the pencils. And I wanted to possess this, not because it was shaped like a helmet, but because it was Swiss.

So I stole it one afternoon on the way back home from school. And when I got home, there was again the old feeling of shape awaiting me. Shame and the sudden realization that I couldn’t show off this exotic sharpener to anyone else as my own, because I possibly couldn’t have gotten something like that. So I had to break it apart, and bury the pieces somewhere deep in my backyard.

In recalling this memory of me as a thief, I now remember other things that originated in this other place that I coveted, and which seemed to me in a way to symbolize the larger inadequacies I was seeking to escape. There were various telescopes, home chemistry sets, tents, fishing rods, bicycles, tennis rackets etc advertised in old and yellowing issues of Archie comics. There were the spaceships, castles etc made out of Lego bricks at my cousins’, who in turned received them as gifts from their American uncle, which I took out every time I visited them from the showcase to gaze and marvel at.

to be continued...