Of memories

I was looking, still, for The Elusive Curio that has dogged my footsteps snd haunted my days and nights. I opened the plastic bag that housed the remains of my many years of solitary play in Barbieland.

Wow, that's it?

There were a million memories in there, the American Bazaar in Lagos where we bought lots of random Barbie accesories, which reminded me of the My Little Pony Shetland and stables bought secondhand there, and that quintessentially American shiny plastic carnival-balloon [it's called metallised nylon, thank you Wiki] that floated above my head all the way home.

At some point a few years ago - I cannot for the life of me remember when - there was a big chance that we'd have to move out of 3/42, Vishwas Khand, Gomti Nagar, Lucknow, that had been my address long enough for me to feel lousy about it. The toys were the first to go. It was time to put them away anyway - Baba I suppose was already at college, and I had outgrown them too. So I packed up everything. My stuff I wanted packed and ready, not lying around creating a nuisance for everybody.

Well, whadya know. We didn't move. I'm glad every day that we didn't need to. Who cares if this is not our own house, if it's somebody else's and we just rent it. We've spent ten years here.

So the Barbie bag was no little Pandora's Box.

That's how love is supposed to be, isn't it? I thought.
You open a bag you had forgotten years ago, and you feel that bittersweetness. You know it's gone, but so what? It didn't last forever, so what?

Forever is here inside me. Whatever else I have or do not have, I have this. The memories are mine.

Even love has no room for hysterics or maudlin [sic.].
We live.
I live.
Every day is a new algebraic sum of my life. It hasn't failed me yet, been positive ever since I can remember.

Move over Godot,

Je suis comme ça. Je fais tous les deux. J'oublie tout de suite et je n'oublie jamais.

Catch-22 and The Emperor's New Clothes

I wrote a 'paper' on Catch-22 just over a month ago. It won a (negligible) prize at this Paper Presentation contest we had at college during Litmus, the English Department fest.

Now here's the deal:

a. I wrote this for a lark
b. I had not been able to finish Catch-22 ever before, having started to read it at least thrice. It was a challenge.
c. I wanted to see just how much I can use my faffing skills, to pusk faffdom to its utmost limit: that was the goal.

Apparently I achieved it too.

The only one who seemed to see through me was SC.

SC was congratulating all the 'winners' after the results came out, but she didn't say a word to me. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, now, but I think she didn't know what to make of my 'paper'. To acknowledge that it was just a hoax would have been out of the question, right? I mean the Establishment can't do that, can it? But then it was obviously (well, to me, at least!) not a serious academic effort. I should have thought it was obvious to everyone else too. Anyway, you never know with SC.

It struck me that there were enough phonies^ in that room to say, "Jolly good, old chap, impeccacable delivery, it was rather intriguing the way you grappled with these ideas". Well not exactly that, but that drift.

For god's sake, my 'paper' was called

Yossarian and Murphy: The Greatest Conspiracy (Theorists) of our Time Or Which came first? The Conspiracy or the Theorists?

I would have had a good laugh, given the presenter a friendly pat on the back, and said a person who tries to pass this off as a Paper should try for the Ignobel instead.

It's quite scary how far the ole faffin' can take you. Remember Stephen Glass? Oh boy.

//This post has been written in a rather perfunctory manner due to constant net connectivity problems and the fact that this machine keeps rebooting of its own accord, this rudely breaks the train of thought; perhaps I shall edit it later, but I doubt it. In any case, as I told a friend, I have just shelved this piece away for future amusement value and plan never to write like this again. *fingers crossed behind back*//

//Oh, I remembered now what I was going to say. Baba once wrote an article to the Lucknow city supplement of either Hindustan Times or The Times of India, I forget which. It was titled "My Girlfriend is a Handbag". No kidding. It was to see if they would actually run something which sounded so patently stupid. Guess what? They did! And with a picture of a handbag and everything. All it said was that guys think their girlfriends are just fancy accessories to show off, nothing more subversive than that! but isn't it incredible what rot people will print?

This whole thing reminds me of that episode in the Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night

//

^ Yes, yes, Caulfield's got a Holden me!

Trillions Apart

I weep when I hear John Lennon sing,
And I wept when George Harrison died.
I took out dad’s old tapes and listened to GH play Here Comes the Sun alone
And I cried.
I walked across Abbey Road.

I weep when I hear my mother’s old house in Gole Market has been demolished years ago.
I weep when my grandfather tells me of his days in Kalpathy, at Annamalai, in Cuttack, in Srinagar and in Sudan.

I wept when I read the stories my grandmother wrote in Tamil, in English
and were published after she died;
Stories about ourselves.

I jump for joy when I realise I live in the place that gave birth to Golgappa, Puchka, Panipuri and Batasha.
And laugh when I realise further that they are all the same thing
and delicious all.

I walked through the pines that rise on one side and fall on the other side of the road
in Ranikhet in the Kumaon hills.

I picked up pebbles from the bottom of Kempty Falls in Mussoorie
And sand from underneath my feet at Kanyakumari.

I have between the pages of my books
Maple from Toronto and Silver Oak from Lansdowne in Uttaranchal.

I walked barefoot on Eleko Beach;
that rests, on one side, on Lagos
and on the other, on the Atlantic.

I touched the Eiffel Tower at the foot because I could not afford to take the lift to the top.
I always put a coin in the guitar-case of a busker.

I fell asleep in Hyde Park,
The bright sun on my face
and the boys playing football - or is it soccer? -
teams of Shirts and No-Shirts.

Whenever I drive through Rajpath I crane my neck out of the auto-rickshaw
to see Parliament House on one side and IndiaGate on the other.
I get goosepimples whenever I hear the National Anthem
of India
of Nigeria.

Is Delhi - where I study - my home?
Or is Lucknow - where I live -?
Is Lagos - where I grew up - my hometown
Or is it Hyderabad - where I was born?

Am I an Indian?
A Palakkad Iyer?
Am I a traveller
Or just lost?

I belong everywhere
And so I belong nowhere.

Who am I?
Or can I never hope to answer that
while I sing
in Tamil, in English, in Hindi, in Spanish, in French, in Arabic, in Assamese, in Gujarati, in Bengali, in Italian and in every language singable.

I search for languages unknown
That everyone will understand
But no one can claim

And I search.