Yesterday I walked down a couple of miles on Bloor St West*, to situate myself a little more throughly in this city. The main objective was to find a masala dosa and filter coffee place, which I failed to fulfill.

What is fascinating, however, is to see how the nature of commerce changes all along this street; close to the hotel I am at, it is all high end designer boutiques. Half a mile down west, most of the stores then, seem to have tailored themselves to the students of University of Toronto; numerous cheap bookstores (I bought Richard Wilbur's "Collected Poems", in hardcover, for one third the retail price, along with Czeslaw Milosz's "Second Space"), and cheap eats. Further down, one runs into Little Korea with its Korean churches, karaoke bars, and barbecue places (I prefer not to eat meat for a first meal, and hence didn't bestow my patronage on places that looked yummy and cheap - I am tired of eating those $40 hotel entrées, which get served when I order room service).

Later in the evening, as a break from reading in a local Tim Horton's (Canadians unlike the obesity-plagued American seem to believe in smaller portions; the medium coffee I ordered was smaller than the small coffee one gets at a Starbucks), I took the Subway (a poor East-West & North-South cross-like grid, very similar to Atlanta's) down to King's Street (yes, Canada was - still is? - a dominion of the Great British Empire) to go to a photography exhibit, and meet some locals.

It is there I realized that I can't make conversation without threading in references to books that I have read, or am reading. What I keep forgetting is that contemporary society's reading habits, give or take a few hidden bastions to be found in every city, span no further than gazing at this web of manufactured cultures that envelopes up. Also that to be considered hip is to have a wide education in the music scene; if you know your bands, conversation is easy, meaning and emotion can be discussed in the armature of a fleetingly popular song.

So for most part, I stood around, a total stranger with my tongue back to its tricks of slurring and tripping over words, making doggish noises that pass for English, but noises which many of the others' ears could not decipher. With the few folks I did manage to have conversations, I discussed cities, occupational hazards to turning a serious hobby into a paying job, and Italian emigrations after World War-2. Walking back, I realized that it was on the very same stretch of King's Street that I had written this poem, on a similar night, couple of years ago.

...

Today I will walk down Bloor East, across the Bloor Street Viaduct, so memorably described in Michael Ondaatje's novel "In the Skin of A Lion", over to Don River Valley, to go to Greek Town for dinner.

On the trip back home, I am waiting at Bombay’s Sahar Airport (more recently renamed Chatrapati Shivaji Airport, after a seventeenth century local king, just as Bombay reverted to Mumbai, after a local Hindu goddess Mumbadevi), alternately walking around and sitting down to escape a swarm of persistent mosquitoes. India is also defined by such persistent species of life.

Next to me three jewelry laden Gujarati ladies, who are as equally persistent, speaking in rapid fire Gujarati. I am assuming they are discussing business, as they eat something wrapped in a greasy newspaper. The younger one makes a few ineffectual gestures, as if asking the two older ones not to embarrass her by eating their homemade snack in the lobby, where perhaps such activity is not allowed, before she joins them.

Facing me are a couple and a newly married women friend of this couple, an interracial couple next to them with the woman, who is Caucasian, appearing totally out of place due to her height and girth, and at the end of a row, a few sleepy kids watching Bollywood junk on TV. For the last thirty minutes I have been alternately trying to read Ved Metha’s essays from the New Yorker (one dealing with his adventures to become an American citizen was quite a humorous read), squashing a few more mosquitoes as well playing a guessing game to write about the inner life of these fellow waiting room passengers.

Finally we are called upon to board and I find myself seated behind the wing of the 747. Seated next to me is the couple that was waiting opposite to me previously. Now I notice that the woman is expecting a baby. The plane takes offs to Delhi and I fall into an uneasy drowse. I wake up when the pilot comes over the intercom asking us to fasten the seat belts, and see a thin slice of sun over the far horizon. Directly underneath me it is still dark. In this I am reminded of an earlier dawn I had witnessed from Tiger Hill above Darjeeling, in the Eastern Himalayas, where I had gone to see the sun rise over the snow covered ranges extending into Nepal and Mt Everest.

We soon descend into a foggy Delhi for an hour’s layover to pick up some more passengers for the run to London.

And now we are off to London, flying west over the plains of Punjab and Pakistan (patches of green and rust, cut by ribbons of five rivers – Punjab means the land of five rivers) and then westwards over mountain ranges of Persia. This time there are no clouds between the plane at thirty five thousand feet and the ground, enabling me to see the mountain highways and the barely perceptible trucks on them. I also see patches of snow. The whole ground comes off as a fantastic abstract canvas.

The plane is now flying over Tehran. It appears as if it has snowed hard down there over the last couple of days. I can make out the two main avenues that run east west in Tehran. I shall be visiting this city sometime soon to research a novel I want to write, exploring the close connections between Hindustani classical music and Persian music, and since I am a sucker for them, a tragic love story. If I had lived a few centuries ago, I would have made the same trip from India on horse and camel back, yes only if I were a rich nobleman in the Mughal court.

End of Turkey and we are now over the Black Sea onto Romania. I had first wrongly guessed it as the Mediterranean before the in-flight map corrected me. Eastern Europe occupied my consciousness in the late nineties when the dictatorial regimes in these countries were collapsing like ninepins. I remember that when the protesters burst into the Presidential palace in Bucharest, they found that Madame Consenscu (sp?) had a precious shoe collection, which easily rivaled that of Imelda Marcos, wife of the deposed Filipino dictator.

Meanwhile the husband sitting next to me is getting dangerously drunk on the free whiskey they have been serving in-flight. He has been weeping for the past ten minutes and the wife has been trying to console him. Later when I get up to go to the restroom and return I see that he had done the noble deed all over the seat. So I currently find myself seated between two fat gentlemen, who are discussing the very interesting topic of cheap intercontinental airline fares and deals in Hindi across the space called me.

I doze off again fitfully and wake up as the plane descends towards Heathrow, London for a break of about two hours. We disembark and are checked out into one of the vestibules of the airport and asked not to wander for too long as we are required to get back on in thirty minutes. I stand against a wall and watch various types of humanity pass by me. Arabs in their flowing khayaeffs (sp?), Europeans with styled coiffures, Muslims returning from the navel of Islam, Mecca and Hajj, a Tibetan lady with a thick layer of prayer beads around her neck and in a skirt that I have till date only seen in photographs or movies, Hasidic Jews dressed in regulation black with top hats speaking Hebrew. All this makes me muse on how airports form the caravanserai of our modern world. Airport cities such as Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong have gone farther and have tailored their existence around the travelers passing through them.

On the intercom, a British voice asking us to get back on the plane. We are herded into a waiting lounge and await entry back into the plane’s mouth. For the lack of anything better to do I start reading a travelogue of someone who had chased the monsoon in India and then wrote about it. The page I read about details his hospitalization for a nervous disorder in London and how he gets the idea to chase the monsoon from a maverick Indian businessman he meets in the hospital. People clutching red passports, which I later learn are British, sit next to me and talk in whispers. Across the aisle a rather fashionable girl, who is wearing bright red lipstick, is desultory thumbing the latest John Grisham ‘novel’. A girl walks up to where I sit and sits in the empty chair next to me. I suddenly find myself getting wary about people watching. So I go back to reading the travelogue.

A boarding call and the passengers rush to get in line to get on the plane. I watch the surge. The call however proves to be false. And I am amused, boredom enables one to be amused by inanities, the so-called TV humor shows with their canned laughter, the best proof. The girl seated next to me, who also heeded to the false alarm, sits down again and I smile at her. I begin a conversation with her, surprising myself given that I find it difficult to open conversations and then make small talk. I question and she answers, inanities such as where she is headed to in the US, what does she do, where did she study and so forth. She has soulful eyes, is quite pleasing to look at and her English has a distinct Southern Indian accent. Soon the call to board the plane is made and we join the queue for the final leg of the journey into JFK. It is only later I realize that we didn’t even exchange names.

I have a whole row of seats to myself, so I lay down for a nap and sleep most of the way into New York. I wake up as the plane descends into JFK over Long Island. Only as we land, I glimpse the unmistakable spire of the Empire State Building, tiny in the distance. Soon I find myself in the line at the Immigration desks, where I am thumb printed and photographed sans my spectacles (irises offer a more foolproof personal identification), in order to enter Fortress America. The Romans, i.e., the citizens on the other hand zoom through the gates. Here I think of Salman Rushdie’s book of essays, ‘Step Across This Line’, in which he details of how for people who desire to step across borders, with global village remaining a cozy sentimental myth travel wise where a simple matter of crossing a street entailing a torturous obstacle course, passports become the most important and prized possessions.

I am on the final leg of the voyage to Atlanta. The plane is taxiing and we take off into the night sky. Out of the window, I see the web of brilliant light that is New York City. Such a sight is capable of impressing even the most jaded of the philistines. I press my face closer to the window. Manhattan is simply a blaze of light for this height, ten thousand feet. The Brooklyn Bridge, subject of that Hart Crane’s rhapsody, is a lovely sight, lined with violet lights. In the bay directly below the plane I see some ships as I scan the sea for the Statue of Liberty. I finally see the lights of the island.

We are now traveling over the Eastern seaboard, a continuous swath of lights. And finally land at Atlanta. I return home and sleep for eighteen hours straight.

This city in India is a metaphor of a barely functioning anarchy. The attack on the senses is unrelenting, with a mixture of fantastic, grotesque, wonderful and plain bad. However what makes it an anarchy is not these stimuli but just the mass of human beings. Human beings like ants, a swarm of flies, buzzing bees and so on. I think it must be this density of human concentration that also colors the Indian philosophy of being detached even in the middle of samsara, which anyway is maya. Perhaps that is how I should learn to absorb the anarchy, which in it’s reality itself to be unreal or maya.

The city I knew has vanished completely. Every empty spot of land has been covered with grotesque concrete. But now I am quite tired and don’t feel like writing, so I shall suspend this narrative here.

21:35 IST 2004:02:11

Today was the first day of doing nothing. The previous two days involved forays into the city to shop for various things. My sister said that I was on the verge of driving her crazy by repeatedly repeating ‘madness’ over and over again. But that is all I could come up with when I came face to face with the multitudes of people walking, riding bicycles, driving two wheelers, cars, buses, trucks etc on the various thoroughfares of the city. As I told my sister the traffic on any of those streets is a perfect demonstration for the Brownian motion.

I suppose I had become so much inurned to all this after living in the almost hermitic quite of Atlanta that my reaction is extreme. But even if I had never left this country and instead went into a deep sleep like Rip Van Wrinkle and woke up after the period of three odd years, I would find it hard to recognize this area where I grew up.

Not that is not right I would recognize is no doubt because the elemental components, say for example say in the morning time with milkmen yelling, roosters crowing, women adorning their house fronts with rangoli, various vegetable and fruit sellers with their carts hawking their wares, urchins begging, rag pickers whose livelihood is recycling, the familiar echo of Sanskrit hymns from the loudspeakers of various temples, school children in various plumages going to school, later as the night falls drums beating out an elemental two beat from the villages which are way off, perhaps to celebrate a wedding celebration or a festival of one of the pantheistic manifestation of god for the simple folk.

But what I would find hard to like, as I do now, is the amount of frenzied noise and frenetic activity that plagues this concrete jungle, this once an almost village of my youth. The other morning I went on to terrace, i.e., the rooftop of this house and saw a sky swamped with high-rise apartments, billboards and more buildings. Their density has gone up so much that the few glimpses of the rocky horizon have vanished.

For some reason whenever I sit before the computer here I feel quite tired after writing only a few hundred words. So I think I shall go and write in the notebook.