I Want To Go Back To Hampi Again

It's winter and it's cold and it's sunny, and I feel like going back to Hampi again.

Hampi, two years ago, was magic. An overnight train journey from Bangalore, but it felt like we were on a different planet.

Red-brown boulders teetering precariously on hills. Ruined temples waiting patiently in the sunshine. The reconstructed monuments filled with tourists. The colourful shanty town with its cowshit-splattered streets and its numberless guest-houses. Flocks of foreigners flying by on bicycles. The Tungabhadra, flowing majestically through it all.

What I liked most was that we could lose ourselves if we wanted to - step away from the main touristy places and become one with the landscape. Climb a  hill of boulders and survey the almost-Martian landscape; sit on the cold stone floor of a temple and absorb the absolute silence; take a random footpath and stumble across a ruined building nobody might have entered in centuries.

It was hot, and our legs ached. We ate dosas from a hand-cart in the morning, curd rice on the banks of the Tungabhadra for lunch, and pesudo-Continental in a shady place for dinner. The temples smelt of pigeon-shit. The river was cold and slow and grey. The green sugarcane fields looked strange next to the copper-coloured hills. Monkeys sat on temple walls and made faces at us.

And through it all, there was a surrealness. How did this Martian landscape of red-brown boulders come to be on Earth? Had this deserted row of stone stalls really been a crowded market a few centuries ago? Did this cobwebbed monkey-infested stone structure really once contain the smell of incense and the sound of chanting and the glow of lamps?

Hampi, above all, was about the passage of time. The footsteps and laughter and prayers of people seemed to echo down the centuries to us. They seemed to mingle with the shouts and laughter of the Hampi of today. They seemed to say - yes, you shall also be gone one day, and what shall you leave behind?

Right Now

I'm sitting in a cane chair on the balcony, a tulsi plant on the floor to my left, and a row of drying clothes to my right. The balcony is a boring old thing, if I had any imagination I would fill it with plants and make a tropical rain-forest that would drown out the fact that facing it on the opposite side, barely a few feet away, is the wall of the next building, a horrible splotched wall decorated with old pipes, both rusty-red and plastic-grey, but it's alright, this time next year it'll be a blue blue lake out there, and a nice wind that will make me shiver.

Somewhere below a mother and daughter are making an Onam sadya, the daughter asking the mother for instructions on Avial making, I think they must be living in different apartments and talking to each other across balconies, for why else can I hear them so clearly. I try to listen in, are they mother and daughter or mother-in-law and daughter-in-law? I can't tell, their language is middle Kerala, all musical and affected and polite, illya's and varu's, not the straight talk of my own part of the world.

Above me drone helicopters, that's the price you pay for living behind HAL. But I like them, I've been reading a history of Bangalore, and I feel connected to the city, to the romance of the old companies that helped make it what it is today. I squint up into the sky at the helicopter, and two birds seem to be giving it company, but they see me and they veer off and settle down on the roof of the building opposite me.

I break off a leaf of the tulsi plant and tear it up and hold it to my nose, and that smell, it takes me back about fifteen years, to a broken old well, moss-covered and dirty and maybe filled with ghosts, what does an eleven-year-old know? A tall tulsi plant grew on the side of the well and now I can't see a tulsi plant without thinking of that tulsi plant, I don't even know if it's still alive. They cleaned up that place, it used to be a broken old temple and a broken old well, and snake gods and tall trees and vines that looked like real live snakes, and we used to play there, the three of us, but now it's all cleaned up and you can't step on the grounds without taking your shoes off and now what's the point anyway?

My feet are warm because I've put them right where a bar of sunlight has managed to break through the buildings. It's a good thing we're on the top floor, at least I have a bit of sky, and it's a glorious blue sky, who was it that wrote about clouds like woolly sheep on blue grass, that sort of sky.

On my lap is Blindness, a book both the brother and the father recommended, and I've been resisting it for a year, but what better time to read it than when I'm affected by a pestilential eye infection that seems to have found a nice home in my eyes. First it nested in the white of my eye and turned it red and made me leak tears all day long, it stayed there for two weeks, and then it decided the black part was better, and now I can't see a damn thing for all the fog. But at least it means I don't have to cook an Onam sadya unlike the poor women downstairs.

I've given up on the book, because I'm not reading it, I'm squinting at it, trying to stop the letters from turning into blurred black dots, and squinting is no fun, even in the sunlight, and why would I want to do it, I'm already half-blind anyway. But I like the way Saramago writes, my thoughts go wandering and they pour out like his prose, no breaks or full-stops, just an onward flow like a river towards an ocean, and hence this post because it's easier to write like this when you can't see what you're writing.

Goodbye, Google Reader!

Because tomorrow, you're dead. Your parents, who once swore to do no evil, are now killing you off. They're being the Big Bad Corporate they once swore not to be, and they're being merciless with you and with all of us who love you.

But wait - this post is not going to be a whine-post. This is going to be a happy celebratory post, about all the good times we've shared, and all the laughs we've had.

I don't remember who introduced us, or even when we first met. I know it's been at least six years, because you were with me when I moved to Jamshedpur in 2007. So that's a long time, Reader. I know there must be millions of others who've known you longer, and who've even spent more time with you than I have. But that doesn't matter to me. You occupy a special place in MY heart. 

I'm going to miss your white-and-blue face. I'm going to miss how simple you were to navigate. I'm going to miss how you used to let me decide what to read rather than try to figure it out on your own. I'm going to miss always having at least one Chrome tab showing those comforting blue and red squares. I'm going to miss periodically making Resolutions to read more intellectual stuff, and then guiltily lapsing back to the fun stuff. 

There was a time my favourite thing about you was the 'Like' option. I used to obsessively check how many 'likes' my posts had got, how many shares. But your parents stripped you of that in an attempt to promote their other, more colourful, more swashbuckling younger child, Plus. I should have realized then, of course, that the end was near, that it was only a matter of time before they decided to do away with you completely.

But you know what they say about how evil begets evil? I hope and suspect that that'll be true in this case. I don't think Plus will ever be loved as much as you were, Reader. They're shoving Plus down our throats in a way that'll just make us choke on it. 

Whereas you grew on us, you made us love you with your simplicity and your gentleness. You didn't mind when we were too busy for you. You waited for us to come back to you, as we all eventually did. You didn't wave periodically at us from Gmail and Blogger and every other Google site we use, the way Plus is doing today. You were patient, and you were laid-back, and you were nice. For me, you  represent an older and nicer Internet, and maybe an older and nicer Google. 

We love you, Reader. And we're going to miss you. 

G is for Goa

This post is part of the A to Z Challenge.

The first time I visited Goa, I was twenty-one. 

There were fifteen of us in the group. We had spent the  last two years on a tiny campus, and it showed - there were close friendships, and there were rivalries too. But we had fun. 

Swimming far out to sea on a flat beach that just seemed to go on and on. Just sitting on the sand and letting the waves wash over us endlessly. At night, watching the lights of distant ships passing us by on the sea, and far away planes flying across the sky. 

One night, maybe a couple of days before we were to leave, I lay on the sand and stared at the stars and dreamt of my future. Everything seems so much clearer on the seashore, doesn't it? I can look at those waves and see my future as I want it to be. Or maybe it's the fact that I spent most of my life not ten kilometers from the sea. 

Goa, I promised myself, would be my touchstone. I would visit every year, and see if I was still living the life I had wanted to live. And if not, I would change. Life seemed so full of possibilities back then, cliched as it is to say that. If I didn't like what I was doing, I would change - it was that simple.

It took me four more years to visit Goa again. 

And those four years have been eventful. I've spent three years in the corporate world, and have changed beyond recognition. I got married somewhere along the way. We've bought a flat. I took a year off from work to follow a near-impossible dream, and failed - my first real 'hit in the guts' failure in life, I suppose.

I wish I could sit my twenty-one-year-old self down and have a nice chat with her on some moonlit Goa beach. Tell her that there are some steps in life that are more permanent than others. You can't suddenly  get up one day and decide to change who you are and what you've done. That you can't go back in time, no matter how much you want to. 

And most of all, that life isn't like the dreams you dream on a Goa beach. There is wild happiness, and there's quiet contentment, but there is sorrow and tears as well. There's mind-numbing monotony, and if you want variety and excitement - you'll just have to go out and make it for yourself.

The February Resolution

The first time I sent in something I wrote for a competition was when I was eleven or twelve. The internet revolution was just beginning in India, and I had just discovered Class on the Web. The site had a lot of material related to my school syllabus, but I was more interested in the monthly 'Creative Writing' competitions they were conducting.

The first piece I sent in was a poem. The first paragraph went like this:

The little girl sat thinking,
With a heart fast sinking
"Oh, so much work to do!
But I want to watch cartoons!"

I guess it's probably a good thing I don't remember the rest. But don't judge me - I was eleven, okay?

Anyway, even though the poem was pretty bad, I won a prize. It was a whiteboard, a tiny book-sized one, and came with a blue pen. I never actually  used it though. Eventually, the ink in the pen just dried out from lack of use.

When my grandmother's eldest sister, a famous reader herself, learnt that I had won a 'writing' competition, she gave me a gift - a beautiful book, with a colourful cover and thick white ruled pages. She presumably wanted me to use it for all the brilliant verse I would no doubt now spew forth. But I couldn't bring myself to use the book, it was much too pristine. So it stayed empty. I don't know where it is now - I guess it must have gotten lost during the later shift to Delhi.

But strangely, despite that early encouragement, I've written very little since then. My friends talk about how they had articles published in newspapers when they were kids, but I never did any of that. Sure, English teachers loved to read my essays aloud in class. And sure, I've 'edited' a couple of magazines in my time. But that's about it.

This might seem funny to people who've been reading this blog for a long time. Yes, I've been blogging for eight years now, on and off. But the posts on this blog are pretty much all I wrote during those eight years.

I did a self-diagnosis last year. My problem, I decided, is that I don't like actually showing my writing to people who know me. The decision I made last year to start writing this blog under my own name was an attempt to correct this problem.

But it hasn't worked out. First of all, I wrote barely twenty posts last year. And secondly, I can see a clear difference (both in quality of writing and content) between the stuff I wrote under a pseudonym, and what I've written in the last one year under my own name.

And then last week, I learnt that I had won this. For those who can't be bothered clicking through, it's a short story competition, the second edition of one run by the Indian Women's Press Corps. The prize money is good - 25, 000 rupees. That lends it a certain weight in the eyes of people who can't really tell one competition from another.

But for me - it's not about the prize money at all. It's a sort of - vindication. YES, I'm a writer. Not an aspiring writer, not a wannabe writer. A WRITER. And that feels damn good.

I'm suddenly glad that I took a year off from work. No matter how the real reason for that break turns out, it allowed me to get back to my writing. I've been writing short stories. I've started work on a novel. I've been participating in short story competitions off and on.

Unfortunately, it's still tough for me to show my stories to people and get feedback from them. Even the short story that won - I didn't show it to anybody before sending it out. In fact, despite the win, I STILL haven't shared it with anybody, not even those closest to me. Especially those closest to me, I should say.

But I realize that if I want to do anything remotely serious with my writing, I need to start sharing it with people.

So here's a resolution. Since we're way past New Year's, I'll call this a February Resolution.

I will write at least one hundred posts on this blog this year. 

That's a post roughly every three days. That's going to be a bit of a challenge of course, considering the fact that I wrote hardly anything last year. So I'm going to allow myself to cheat a little.

1. I can post short stories, no matter how bad they are. Feedback would be much welcome.
2. The longer stories can be split into two, and those WILL count as two posts.
3. Once in a while, I can post inspiring/interesting clippings from books and blog posts, such as this one.
4. Travelogues count, too. And yes, they will obviously be split into multiple parts, because my travelogues are generally long.

So if you don't want to see a LOT of me in the next few months, unsubscribe from this blog NOW. And if you do want to read me, get ready for a bumpy ride!

Watching Ourselves Grow Old

And all of us are going old. It was inevitable, of course. But it's sad, nonetheless.

When will we realize that we are? Growing old, I mean. When will we realize that we can't continue the same lifestyles we always had? That we're no longer immortal. That Time has touched us with his black brush, that we can no longer remain arrogant, uncaring. That we can longer eat and drink and smoke and smoke up like we used to.

When others tell us? When we watch television shows in which it happens to other people, and it strikes us in a blinding epiphany? When our bellies overhang our belts by a certain number of inches (because they already do, you know)? When we wake up from restless sleep, and try to decode the unsettling dreams we struggled through? When a friend dies one day - a heart attack, a brain hemorrhage, or something more innocuous?

'Carpe Diem' is so much more poignant now. Because the number of days we have, they dwindle. They're no longer infinite, stretching ahead of us like an endless golden beach.

It's easy to waste a day, many days. Just sit still in a corner, and the day is gone. That's good in a way, because it helps us survive. But it's also bad, because you wake up one morning, and your life is spent, over, wasted. How do you make it count?

How do you manage to get up from the couch in front of the television, how do you stop your hand from stuffing your mouth, how do you stop doing what's easy and accepted and acceptable? How do you figure out what you want to do? And if it's different from what you're doing right now, how do you make that switch?

It irritates me, in a way. That people are okay to do this. That they're not even aware of their own potential, of what they're wasting. It worries me that I'm the only who's worried.

I tell myself I'm not like them, that I'm not wasting my life. But me, what am I doing? Do I know what I want, am I working towards it?

A flat on a lake-shore. A green painting on a wall. Enough money to travel and see the world. Fulfillment, the knowledge that what I'm doing makes a difference. Books, lots of books, and enough time to read them. A book of my own, but only if it's good. These are some of the things I want, things I have, things I would like more of.

And what I don't want? No TV. No car. No middle-class urban life. Trainspotting pretty much summarized it for me. Maybe I should put it up on a wall, as a reminder. Though it may be too late already.

Life

It's been raining for three continuous days in Bangalore. Lovely wet weather. The entire world is gray, it reminds me of foggy winter mornings in Delhi, waiting for the school bus and shivering in my short skirt. But now it's seven years later, and I'm waiting for the bus that will take me to office. I tweet from my phone about the song playing in my head. I think of how much my world has changed in seven years.

Inside the bus, it's too dark to read my Murakami. I settle back with headphones plugged in and the music on shuffle. The first song is Blue October's 18th Floor Balcony, which doesn't quite suit my mood. Skip. Next up is Norah Jones, and she is exactly, exactly right.

I open my eyes and stare out through the window at the Bangalore traffic. Honking motorists, construction work, wet orange mud by the side of the road. The proverbial traffic jams of Bangalore, made worse by the unceasing rain. I float above it all, uncaring. I'm inside my exclusive shell, and nothing can touch me here. The rain makes wet channels on the window, wiping away the dirt. I watch the water flow down and wish it was that easy to cleanse human souls of all the bad things we accumulate. Not just sins - attitudes, habits, resignation, blind acceptance.

Vellai Pookal. Ah, even better. Such a beautiful, comforting song. The very first strains make me happy.

A flyover is being constructed, and we get stuck at the junction. I can't see the sky, or anything remotely green. A monstrous pillar rises up high next to my window, drowning out light, sky, nature. At the base of these pillars, scattered all around, are iron rods and heavy machinery, rusted metal and concrete blocks. Holes gape open for no particular reason. It's a sea of heavy sticky brown mud, thankfully fenced off from the road. I close my eyes rather than have to look at such vileness.

Tum Ho Toh from Rock On. We move on from the junction, and enter the road that leads directly to office. The land is more open here. Fields on either side, waterlogged now and waiting for the sun. A solitary lake, fuller now than I've ever seen it. The gray sky, heavy and roiling with rain. Apartment buildings dot the horizon, and more are under construction. Soon, I'm sure they will even fill up the fields to build more of them. I hate apartment buildings.

The office is two minutes away. I sigh. I open my bag and take out the tag with my office ID card. I used to hate it so much, it was a sign of my selling out. But now I'm resigned to it. It's there around my neck, the whole day. I barely notice it. I put it on, and step out of the bus with the rest, heading in a straggly bunch to the office building.

Open Letter to Facebook Spammers

I posted this letter as a note on Facebook, in a desperate attempt to get people to stop spamming my Facebook stream. Considering the zilch effect it had on them, I suspect it was drowned out by the very spam it was supposed to fight. Posting it here because it's sort of a continuation of this post.

Dear Facebook Spammer,

I know this letter of mine is going to cause some strain in our relationship, but I can't help it. Trust me, I've thought long and hard about this. The decision to write this letter was a painful one.

So I'll get straight to the topic.

Stop spamming - just stop. Desist. Refrain. Please.

I know it's tough, and I know I have no right to be ordering you about. It's a free country after all. But still.

I do understand that you feel the need to consult your daily horoscope every day on Facebook. And of course I can accept the fact that you must ask Mystical Meg a whole bunch of questions before you can make a decision of any sort. And believe me - I too want to know how many people have a crush on me and who my Enemy of the Day is. And when I get bored, I take random Facebook quizzes too, just like you.

After all, Facebook is all about the mindless entertainment.

But when these applications ask me whether I want to publish the results on my page -  now that's where I pause. I think about it. I weigh my options.

Do I WANT people to know that I just took the 'How well do you know your Harry Potter' quiz? Will the results of my consultation with Anita the Online Psychic interest them at ALL? Will they WANT to know what my Fortune Cookie (which, by the way, looks like something else entirely) just foretold?

I think these things through. And then I very deliberately click the 'Skip' button.

The problem is that you just don't seem to! And in choosing not to, you clutter up my Facebook stream! In desperation, I even tried Facebook Lite. The lack of spam was simply awesome for two days, but then the usability was kinda meh. So I came back to normal Facebook.

My second problem is with status messages. Don't get me wrong - they're awesome in general. They tell me what my friends have been up to recently. And even when they don't, the people on my friends' list are generally clever/witty/interesting enough for the status messages to be worth reading.

But.

Why oh why, dear FB Spammer, do you insist on linking  your Twitter account to your Facebook profile? Yes, I do know it must be a pain to have to post your awesome status messages separately on Facebook and Twitter each time. But there's this awesome app called Selective Twitter - the premise is that you can 'select' which of your tweets becomes your Facebook status message.

I think the problem is that you don't quite understand the difference between Twitter and Facebook, dear FBS. I won't mind if you spam me on Twitter, because I can always un-follow you there. Yes yes - I know I can hide you from my Facebook stream too - but then I DO want to know what you're up to, FBS. Just not every five minutes is all. I'm sure you understand.

Now now. Don't think I'm deaf - I can hear you wondering why the *BLEEP* I'm on Facebook in the first place, if it pisses me off so much?

I'll admit it's all about the entertainment for me. I like reading people's status messages. I like the videos they post and the photos they put up. I like staying updated with XL news. And of course I can stalk people by visiting their profiles and checking what they've been up to. Okay fine, I guess I might be slightly addicted.

But that's precisely why I really need you to stop ruining the experience for me, FBS. Please.

Love as usual,
Regular Facebook User

Chasing the Sun

Early afternoon. I'm out to get myself a pineapple juice, to make up for having skipped lunch. I give the counter guy the token and wait for him to make it. Just then, I catch a yellow gleam from the corner of my eye. I look up and see that it's The Sun, winking and beaming down at me.

"Why, hello Sun!" I say. "This is a pleasant surprise! Been some time since we've seen you around here!"

"What - what are you saying, girl?" says The Sun. "I've been here almost every day! It's just that I get here a little late because of the rain, so you don't quite see me when you leave for work in the morning."

"Oh right, okay. And it's late by the time I leave, so I don't catch you then either. Right, yeah," I say absent-mindedly, wondering where my fruit juice went. "So what's up? What are you up to these days?"

"Oh, same old, same old. Rise in the East, set in the West. You?"
"Oh I recently started work, ya know. So that's pretty much it," I say glumly.

"Yeah, I was just thinking the other day that it's been some time since I saw you. I remember when you were at XL, you used to sit outside almost everyday, chatting with your friends or maybe reading a book."

"Yeah, those were the days..."

"You know, I like seeing you around. You should get out more in the daytime. Look at you, your skin so pale and your hair so dull."

"I know, I know. But what can I do? Job and all, you know how it is."

"Why don't you get a job that lets you be outside? It would do you a whole lot of good. You're wasting your youth, sitting at a desk all day staring at a screen."

"I know," I say, sighing. I look at the trees waving in the wind and feel a certain longing.

"Imagine," says The Sun temptingly. "Imagine watching a sunset sitting on a cliff. Imagine tramping through the jungle. Imagine swimming in a clear pool. Imagine..."

"Okay, okay. Stop being John Lennon," I say crossly. "It's easy enough for you to say all this. But how do I pay for my expensive education and support myself? Anyway, all this is pure romantic garbage. In reality there would be mosquitoes and heat and having to pee in the bushes and... and I bet it'll all get very boring pretty soon."

Pause.

"And where will it get me at the end of the day anyway? At least I'm doing something here. At least I'll get promoted in some time and reach somewhere and earn some more money. Something to look forward to."

"Oh right," says The Sun with a snicker. "I forgot about the rat race you're part of. Alright, whatever. Have it your way. I'm leaving. See you around, girl."

With that, he hides behind some convenient clouds, leaving me to my suddenly disturbed thoughts.

"Ma'am, your juice," says the counter guy.
"Thank you," I say automatically.

I make sure I leave early that day, just to prove The Sun wrong - in some obscure way. Unfortunately, it's raining and dark and he's nowhere to be seen. I shiver and hug myself and walk all alone to my bus.

Trivandrum Rising

The setting is a serene lagoon, on the far shore of which is a coconut grove. Line upon line of coconut trees rising up as far as the eye can see. A flashy new car draws up on this side of the lagoon. A couple gets out of it, the wife very heavily pregnant. "Why have you brought me here?" she asks the husband in confusion. "Because," the husband replies. "Because... I saw your drawings." The wife gasps in wonder and joy, and the beautiful coconut grove, green and innocent and defenceless, suddenly disappears into thin air. A block of tall buildings replaces it. The ad ends with the name of a popular builder, and a line about making your dreams come true.

I was sitting in the theater watching this, and I couldn't believe my eyes. Were they actually suggesting that it was alright to cut down those beautiful trees and build an apartment block instead? Did they actually expect that anybody would buy a flat there when they were told so explicitly that hundreds of trees would be cut down to build it? What sort of people could think of profiting from such a gross violation of nature?

But this ad is merely a sign of how Trivandrum is changing. The sleepy town that I knew seven years ago is slowly waking up. Stately old mansions all over the city are disappearing one by one. New buildings, multi-storeyed white monstrosities with room for several dozen families, are springing up in their place, changing the skyline of the city for ever. The city is expanding, and these builders are merely catering to the increasing demand for space and comfort.

I have no right to complain, of course. The apartment that my parents are renting is in one such building in the center of the city. My grandmother tells me that this land used to belong to an old Nair family. When the family elder passed away, his three daughters divided the land amongst themselves. The main plot was sold to a builder. The beautiful old house was razed to the ground, and this apartment was built.

It has its own underground car parking. There is a security guard night and day. He questions anybody who wants to enter, and will only let them in once it is confirmed that they are expected. Residents have to carry their own  electronic cards in order to enter the building. This is a place for the affluent, and they need their privacy and security. Who would have ever thought that such a system could exist in Kerala? But standing on the roof of the building, I can see at least three such buildings within a radius of a kilometer, sticking their white bodies out of the greenery.

And more are being built. I visit a grand-aunt who lives nearby. Her house is part of a posh colony in Trivandrum. She has lived there for three or four decades at least. The land is right in the center of the city, and commands lakhs per cent. She must be a crorepati merely on account of owning a house in that area.

However, she has her own troubles. A builder has bought three plots of land behind her house, and is planning to erect an apartment block there. She says, "You know, this house has always been so nice to live in. It has always had excellent sunlight and wind throughout the day. Why, I never even switch on the fan most days! And I've never faced any water shortage - never! But once this building comes up, all those days are over."

I go up on the roof, and I can see what she's talking about. The land slopes down on this side of the house. A wide stretch of trees lies ahead of me; I can see their heads nodding in the wind. Since the other houses are on a lower level, ample sunlight and wind come in from this direction.

But peering over the railing, I realize that that is going to change soon. Construction work is going on in the plot bordering the house. The foundation of a building is being built, and workers are swarming over the site like so many ants. I imagine it rising up storey upon storey, a malevolent monster of concrete and glass, blocking out the sunlight and the wind, dwarfing the little houses around it. Families will come and live in it, and they'll suck up the water in the area, leaving nothing for anybody else. More trees will be cut down, because they'll need space to park their shiny cars.

My heart yearns for the traditional houses. The whitewashed ones with clay tiles covered with moss, and wooden windows lined with bars. An overgrown parambu with coconut trees and banana plants. Jackfruit trees with fat jackfruits hugging the trunk like so many little round babies. Mango trees for the kids to climb, with a swing tied to the fattest branch during Onam. A nalukettu, into which rain thunders with impotent force. Maybe a temple nearby, with a green mossy pond.

I suppose I'm being a traditionalist. Such houses belong to an era long-gone. Change is inevitable, after all. Sleepy little villages have to become busy little towns. Busy little towns have to become polluted big cities. But I'm afraid. I'm afraid that my Trivandrum, the beautiful green Trivandrum of my childhood, is about to lose its lushness, its very personality. I'm afraid that it's going to become just another city.

Moving On

I guess all my non-XL readers must be sick of my XL-related posts by now, but this was something that I wrote for the batch yearbook. I don't know if it will get chosen or not, but I think it's one of my best pieces of writing ever. Just had to post it here.

I walk out of my room, and the corridor is dark and empty. The rooms are all padlocked. I call out, and there is no response - no reassuring sounds from the mess, no music from the corridor across the hall, no call of voices from upstairs. Just a tremendous oppressive silence. There's something wrong, surely.

I walk out on to the veranda of GH3. The morning sunshine is warm and yellow. The birds are calling, the greenery is fresh and bright, the wind is rushing through the trees. But there's something wrong. I suddenly realize what has happened - everybody is gone. All my friends, they've left - never to return again.

I look back at my hostel, and it seems an empty shell. There is no life. The windows are closed and shuttered - the curtains don't twitch in the wind. No music blares out from the rooms. My beloved hostel, and yet not. I leave it behind and walk on. The learning center lies deserted on my left, but I ignore it and move towards JLT.

The sight of the empty JLT and the dark windows of GH1 makes my heart ache. But my spirits lift as I walk between the twin lines of trees. Their towering heads raise my eyes upwards in awe.  The wind whistles through the long leaves and soothes my pain. I sit under BodhiTree, and I feel as if I am in the lap of history. So many people must have sat under this very tree and dreamt of their futures. So many must have talked and laughed and sung songs and been happy here.

GH1 is cool and dark after the sunshine outside. I walk up to the first floor, the IR corridor. I remember how the entire corridor used to empty out five minutes before class, people pouring out of the rooms in a stream of rushing legs and flailing arms. I walk the entire length of the corridor, and run my hand over each of the doors, remembering who had lived where. I smile thinking of each of them, their idiosyncracies, the little stories about them.

The common room is warm and yellow in the sunlight. Dust motes float here and there. I think of all the avatars I have seen this place in - the drunkenness of pulsating lights, the emptiness of the grey dawn, the excitement of MAXI Bazaar, the seriousness of project meetings, the fun of TT matches. It makes my heart ache so much with loss that I just turn back and leave.

Outside, the sunlight seems dimmer, somehow. Dry leaves scrunch underfoot. The bougainvillea in front of the library mocks me with its brightness. Beyond it, the faculty quarters seem dark and promising, inviting me to take a walk under those trees, as I have done countless times before. But what's the point, when all my walking partners have left me?

I go to the sports field. The empty basketball court waits poignantly for the rhythmic thwack of an orange ball. The football field seems resigned to being an overgrown grassland. The tennis court lights are dusty from lack of use. I listen closely, and I can almost hear excited voices from the past, the generations that have played and cheered and been happy here.

How can one be so in love with a place? If it was because of the people and the memories - that would be understandable. But no - I am in love with XL independent of everything that I have experienced here. I am in love with the very air here, the green of the trees, the quality of the sunlight, the orange of the sky, the music of the birds in the trees.

I walk out of the gates of XL, and look back one last time. XLRI 1949, it says. I remember the first time I saw that sign, the excitement and the possibilities those simple letters evoked within me. And now my two years are done. I am now just another of those lucky who have lived and laughed and cried within these walls in the past. Time to move on, time to let another generation come in and experience the magic.

Aayiram Kannumai

I'm sitting in a large well-lit room, surrounded by books and journals. A silent room, in which a lot of people are reading books or working on their laptops. It's a dark Jharkhand night outside - the end of an absentee winter. I have a fat blue book open in front of me - Labour and Industrial Laws by P K Padhi. A blue marker and a pen complete the picture of the faithful ghissu.

Suddenly, in the midst of learning about legal and illegal strikes, I get an image. No, not an image. It's complete with smells and sounds and feelings. I can even feel mosquito bites on my legs.

I'm sitting outside my grandmother's house in Kollam. It's dusk - after six. My grandmother always sits outside in the evenings. She lights the lamp at five-thirty, says her prayers, and then comes and sits outside in the gathering dusk. I sit with her sometimes. There is a half-wall near the gate, with blocks that make comfortable stools to sit on.

We are both sitting in companiable silence. The sun is rapidly setting behind the tall coconut tree in front of the house. Its orange rays come to me through the gaps in the coconut leaves. The call for prayer from the nearby mosque sounds in the distance. Closer, I can hear the sounds of footsteps and voices from the road outside. Mosquitoes bite my legs and arms, and I slap impatiently at them.

This could, really, be an evening from any year of my life - from one of the many summer holidays I've spent there, or maybe the snatched weekends. My favourite house in the whole wide world.

Back when I was a kid, that entire plot of land seemed to hold so many possibilities for excitement. The guava tree was easily climbable, and led up to a nice cosy place for reading on warm sun-dappled afternoons.  The ladder up to the water tank was a perpetual challenge that my brother and I posed to each other. The front yard of the house would become a shallow lake in the rainy season; we would make pristine white boats using fresh paper from our Malayalam tuition notebooks, and make them jostle happily in the water. The jasmine flowers had to be plucked in the evenings. Not that I was ever girly enough to want to wear them on my hair - my poor grandmother always had to give them away to the neighbourhood girls.

Lying in bed huddled under a thin sheet and listening to the rain outside. Being scared every time I had to go to the spooky back portion of the house at night. Reading a book and falling asleep with my glasses on and having grandmother remove them when she came in to sleep. Sitting on the verandah and daydreaming. Staring at the pools and valleys formed by sunlight on the guava leaves.

Were those times actually simpler, or does it just seem so now?

(Title Translation: With a Thousand Eyes. It's a beautiful, beautiful song about longing.)

Fiction

The door clicked open, and yellow light from the hallway flooded in. With a start, she realized that she had been sitting in the dark for the past couple of hours, staring at the hypnotic starlight outside. The moon's rays slanted in through the French windows. Had she moved from the sofa all day? She couldn't remember.

His dark shape blocked out the light. She saw his arm reaching for the switch, and instantly put up her arms to block out the harsh light. She heard a click. And then another, a moment later. Cautiously peering past her arm, she saw that he had switched off the light again. The door clicked shut behind him. The renewed darkness felt cool and welcome on her eyes.

His footsteps sounded in the dark emptiness of the huge room - cautious steps, navigating the furniture. Soon, he was visible by the moonlight. Light coloured trousers and a blue-grey shirt. He went to the window and stared outside silently for a while. She kept her eyes on him, dispassionately taking in his slim form.

He turned and came back to her. Sat beside her on the sofa. Put his arm around her. Caressed her hair. She turned to him, and crushed her face against the crisp blue cotton of his shirt. Breathing in, she smelled the coolness of expensive airconditioning. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I forgot again." Once again, she had left the food untouched. Once again, she had forgotten to switch on the lights at dusk. Once again, she had not stepped outside.

"It's alright," he said. "It'll take time." She sighed, and snuggled closer to him. He hugged her tighter, as if he wanted her to melt into him. And so they sat there in the darkness, the woman who had forgotten how to live, and the man who was waiting for her to remember again.

How It Feels

I walk on endlessly, along the lonely surface. All is quiet. The river beside me makes no noise as it flows along. Its depths are too deep, perhaps. The sand is silver, it rises gently to my right. I am alone. I have been alone many times before, yes, but not lonely. Not this lonely. Before, I knew of people who cared for me, who walked with me in spirit. Now - I am alone, truly alone, cut off from others. And I regret it, I regret it because I know that it was I who cut myself off. Others reached out for me, I ignored them. I hastened away, determined to not need them. And now they have turned away, they care no more. Even if I reached out now, even if I beseeched them, would they hear me? Would they want to?

The river beside me is so silent I do not know if it is flowing or not. I do not want to look into it, I know what I will see. Not the stars in the cloudless sky above, no. I will see faces, memories. I will see the people I cast off, the people I wish would surround me now. And they will invite me down, and I will go with them. I will drown in my memories. I must not.

There is no concept of time here. I do not know when I started walking, or when I shall stop. Perhaps I have stopped before, perhaps I have started again. There is no beginning here, no ending. My consciousness begins and ends with this desolate place, this silent river, these silver sands, this starry sky. I would be nothing if I were not here.

Nothing changes, how ever much I walk. I yearn for a friendly face, a call of greeting, but I am alone. No footprints on the sand, nothing to tell me that I am not alone. I wish I could be certain that there are people who know that I exist, that I am here, that I suffer. But if I could be certain of that, I wouldn't be in this place.

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In Which I Prove That I'm Loony

It's wierd how things that happened a long while back and which you hadn't even thought of for ages can have an effect on you.

Today, on my way home after a truly horrible exam, I boarded bus no. 604, going to Vasant Kunj. It was a DTC bus and there were plenty of seats.

So I was sitting in the bus, minding my business as usual. An old man was snoozing on my left, clutching a black bag tightly to his chest. His head drooped down periodically. A window with a broken pane in the front part of the bus allowed in the chilly wind. The bus was unusually quiet, possibly because everyone was busy shivering.

A red and black Adidas bag lay next to my feet. I was thankful for its presence, because it ensured that anyone walking to the front of the bus wouldn't pass too closely to me, if you know what I mean. I assumed that it must belong to my snoozing copassenger.

A young guy sitting on the seat on the opposite side of the aisle took it into his head to stare at me. I looked away to avoid his eyes and the Adidas bag caught my eye again.

It was a nice bag, good-sized and well-filled. I wondered what Sleepyhead had in it.

Soon, Sleepyhead got off. He didn't take the bag with him, though.

That was when I started to get worried. The bus was half empty and Young Guy and I were the only people for about three rows. There was nobody else that the bag could possibly belong to. Young Guy seemed quite unconcerned about the bag; he was whistling cheerfully to himself and anyway, if it had been his bag, wouldn't it have been on his side of the aisle?

At the next stop, a couple of Army men boarded the bus and sat in the seat in front of me. They didn't even look at the ownerless bag. I suddenly realized that, to other people, the bag must look like mine, since I was sitting right next to it.

I stared at the letters painted onto the seat in front of me:Aapke seat ke neeche dekhiye. Lawaris vastu bam ho sakti hai. Turant shor machayiye. Inaam payiye. I remembered how I'd made fun of these words a couple of times and how I'd promised myself that I'd never do so again.

Should I raise the alarm, I wondered. But how foolish I would look if it turned out that the bag belonged to some guy sitting at the back of the bus. I didn't have the guts to do that, I decided. And anyway, the bag was probably absolutely harmless.

I wished the bus would go faster, so that I could get off the bus and stop obsessing over the bag.

But suppose I was right? Suppose the bag contained a bomb and it was even now ticking down to an explosion? I tried to imagine the explosion and all I could summon up in my mind was some yellow-orange colour. It suddenly came to me that, if I was right, I would never get to know. Because I would have ceased to exist.

It's an unsettling thing, you know - imagining one's sudden erasure from the world. We all survey the world from our own viewpoint and that viewpoint has certain parameters, things that you take for granted. The existence of self is one such. And to imagine the non-existence of self - why, that's contradictory, because how can you imagine, if you don't exist?

Like I said, it's unsettling. Which is not to say that it doesn't have its good points. Everything seems clearer suddenly, better defined. You suddenly notice the man sitting in the front seat with trousers so short that the tops his socks are showing. His raucous laughter isn't background music anymore, it's right there inside your head, mocking you.

I imagined him ceasing to exist and it was rather pleasing. At least his laughter wouldn't hammer its way into my head. But I suddenly realized that he probably wouldn't cease to exist if the bomb went off, because he was sitting at the front of the bus and would probably escape with extensive burns. And with that realization, it hit me that I would much prefer to live - even with burns - than to die and that it would be better for me to shift to the front of the bus so that I would be away from the blast. This also had the added advantage that the conductor would realize that it wasn't my bag and then it would be labelled lawaris vastu.

So, feeling very pleased with myself, I shifted to a seat right in the front of the bus, almost next to the door. So what if it brought me closer to the man and his laughter? I would be away from the bomb. After a while, I chanced to look down and - Aargh! - the bag was right there, next to my feet!

"It's determined to kill me," I thought fatalistically, staring at the bag in horrified fascination (the cliche is very apt here). I wondered why no one else had noticed that the bag had followed me all the way to the front of the bus. I wondered if I was going crazy.

Suddenly, the bag shifted. A hand had come out of nowhere to grasp it. After the initial mental recoil, my eyes followed the hand up to the shoulder and from there to the eyes of Young Guy, who gave me a winning smile. I didn't smile back.

Young Guy got off the bus at the next stop with his bag.

Just An Image

Then suddenly, you want to run - run so hard and so fast that your lungs give up and your heart bursts and you end up on the ground with blood on your lips. And then people will walk around you, and walk past you, and some will tut-tut irritably and some will say poor thing, but none will stop to help, because they'll know that some things are beyond repair.