the lake isle of innisfree

“i will arise and go now, and go to innisfree,
and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
nine bean-rows will i have there, a hive for the honeybee,
and live alone in the bee-loud glade.

and i shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow…”

-- the rose (1893), william butler yeats (1865-1939)

slow weekends

saturday. lunch at 'don giovanni' with one model and two ceos. the model had fish. one ceo had heineken. the other ceo didn't have a problem with water which, come to think of it, is a habit i could learn to pick up. but, not just yet. i, with a hangover, opted for a heineken and followed it with a bloody mary. what the heck, life's too short. pizza, some mushroom in butter, and a very nice salad.

then, irish coffee at prithvi, with shashi kapoor walking past and hangers-on grovelling. for that girth, still an incredibly handsome man. then, vodka with pumpkin at enigma. three down, and the hangover was buried in the murky recesses of my past. pumpkin in a black sweatshirt and those cute, cut-off jeans that end above the ankles. good for teenagers, of course, but perfect for pumpkin who has long mastered the art of looking incredibly cute no matter what she wears. she doesn't believe it when i tell her that though.

post-dinner drink at midnight, by myself, at a quiet, empty bar. and, sleep.

sunday. way too much bad television on offer. i pick margaret atwood instead, hoping for something along the lines of 'alias grace' and settling comfortably, happily, into another story about a bride who can play a thief just as well. dinner at a restaurant in bandra called 'retro place', with a television news reporter. "do they play retro music?" i ask. "yes," she says, "stop annoying me." the retro music exists, but at a volume that has me straining to listen. we leave after i try the 'leek and potato soup'. later, at her place, i sit back and listen as she fills in on the gaps since our last meeting. she's grown up, i think to myself, and leave, happy at the thought.

11 pm. way too early for home. way to early for home in bombay, that is. way past bedtime in delhi and other horrible places that ought not to exist. 45 minutes at a place near toto's. then, home.

coming up this week: more meetings, with more friends and colleagues and entrepreneurs and friends of entrepreneurs. which leaves me with the strange, nagging thought that my life forces me to get busier even as i try conditioning myself to slow down. ironic, considering one of my reasons for quitting publishing was the fact that i was forced to meet too many people.

if all goes well, next year could be a slow one. then again, i doubt it.

past, perfect?

they come back suddenly, in black and white, those classes on the roof. rehaan discussing parentheses, pushan making tanvi privy to visual cues used by gay men, havovi playing hecuba at midnight by an abandoned reservoir in khandala, radhika sniffing glue in class while the rest of us dissect the iambic meter, dilshad carrying in photocopies of a paper on adorno, prajna yelling at me about camus, troy looking down at catholic women in the foyer, harold asking the women if they will consider sleeping with him, anjali telling harold why they never will, aarti smiling quietly, louella and russell discussing russell's silver earring, geeta sleeping calmly through the french symbolists on the basis of some excuse about insomnia, leena and geena doing the things leena and geena alone know how to.
 
they come back suddenly when, now, after a decade has passed, i struggle to stay awake in the face of boring media folk, corporate yuppies in arrow shirts, men and women from colleges and universities i have never heard of, boys and girls who have wasted their lives on years of studying for degrees in commerce and business administration.
 
then, like a breath of fresh air, the children of my youth pop in, every now and then. prajna and lou, tanvi and pushan, rehaan and russell. the years fly by. where have all the xavierites gone?

no smiles tonight

“…
treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken spain :
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of spain
spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.
 
and you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?
 
come and see the blood in the streets.
come and see
the blood in the streets.
come and see the blood
in the streets!”
 
-- ‘i'm explaining a few things’,
neftalí ricardo reyes basoalto
(pablo neruda), 1904-1973.

enlightenment@1500bucks.com

chee chee chee chee ravijunkie the cow woke up on his plush, white mattress, in his plush, white room, with examples of astonishingly bad art tacked up on he walls around him. he woke happy, safe in the knowledge that the figure in his bank account had multiplied many times over during the night. smiling to himself, he ran his fingers through his long, deliberately unkempt hair. it helped the masses believe he was more interested in the spiritual than the corporeal, after all. the fact that it was trimmed carefully to stay the same length was always lost on them. ‘thank god for the semi-literate,’ he mumbled.

today was the day.

sitting up, he looked out the window at the rabble stretched out before his palatial mansion. they came from all across the country, across the globe, somnolent idiots backed by little-known educational institutions, all utterly devoid of minds of their own. they looked towards him for support, for comfort, for tacky breathing exercises that acted as placebos, giving ambiguous meaning to their pointless lives. for 1500 bucks per person, who was he to refuse?

but, today, there were other things to think about. he thought about his guru, the other sleazy cow called maharishi jogi yogi who, decades ago, had done pretty much the same thing, conning naive englishmen into paying for his helicopter rides. 'life was simpler then,' thought chee chee chee chee ravijunkie (the extra 'chee' had been added because his numerologist said it would also help make his inane documentaries hits at the box-office.

practicing his simpering, androgynous tone and absurd fanning motions before the mirror, chee chee chee chee thought about pithy lessons he could spit out today. he knew that, no matter what, the mob would weep copious tears of joy and head for their air-conditioned cars in a state of pious stupidity they had quickly grown accustomed to under his tutelage. 'life is like a box of mithai', he thought, 'all colours and prices'. nah. wouldn't do. what about 'be kind to animals. if they were human they would probably be kind to you'. that could work, he mused, if he were to bring a tear to his eye at the mention of the word 'animal'.

and then, it was over. after an hour of spitting out inanities, all lapped up by the stupid, chee chee chee chee looked around one last time and headed for his helicopter. the instructions had been given. the rabble could always survive on the crappy books he had left behind. if not, another chee chee chee chee could always make an appearance a decade later. there was no shortage of pseudo-spiritual morons in india, after all.

when he left, the only major changes occurred in things like formal letter pads, building boards, web site addresses and gaudy stickers pasted on local trains. overnight, they began to read: 'the art of leaving'...

womankind

"the women gather strangers
to each other because
they have loved a man

it is not unusual to sift through ashes
and find an unburnt picture."

-- nikki giovanni, 'the women gather'

hey reuben

stars in his eyes -- that's what i think he had. he would stare out windows, humming a tune, and walk slowly, moodily, down the street outside, still humming a tune, and spend time between classes, still humming. and he could sing, so we would smile as we watched him. when we were 6, reuben and i, we decided to participate at the school’s annual talent contest. we used to compete for a prize in elocution too, but i would beat him hands down there. so, to put me in place, he decided to do the same by proving i couldn't sing.

at 4 pm that afternoon, a million afternoons ago, he and i, and around 15 other small, 6-year-old boys in blue shorts and maroon ties, decided to get on the big stage and sing our teachers a couple of songs. i didn't stand a chance. reuben won first place.

we kept doing it for years. he and i. i, winning at elocution; he, whipping me at the talent contest year after year. it didn't bother me at all. i knew the boy could sing, but i was comfortable with doing pretty much anything on stage by then, so it was fun. also, i realise, i can now tell adolescent boys and girls that i sang everything from stevie wonder to shakin' stevens in public, and that i walked away without being booed off stage. quite an achievement if you consider the closeted space most adolescents seem to reside in these days.

reuben and i didn't really get along. there was always something edgy between us, thanks to years of competing against each other for some ridiculous prize or another. i would pinch him in class. he would yell and have the teacher send me to the principal or the supervisor (depending on the other horrid things i happened to have done on that particular day). then, i'd come back and pinch him again. he had a knack of losing his temper in a minute, yelling and turning pink, before calming down as suddenly as he had flared up. by the end of the day, however, he would walk past the school gates and get back into that slow, steady groove, humming as he walked past screaming classmates and crowded gola-stalls.

things improved after school, considering we had both given up competing by then. i'd run into him at college, where he would tell the girls about his life and, i imagine, sign them a couple of songs. he always was good at it, after all. he worked at benetton's for a bit, then tried something else, and finally joined the merchant navy. we'd talk whenever he came back, between trips. on the day he turned 20, i gate-crashed his birthday party. "i turn 21 next year," he said, as we stood in a quiet corner for a minute. "so, come." i smiled at him and said, "i'd love to." he left on another trip soon after.

four months later, reuben came back. in a wooden box. he had fallen off a mast 60-feet high, crashing his head against the railing on deck. i'm told he died instantly.

i went over to say good-bye, along with a hundred other classmates who, like me, knew reuben and remembered watching him walk, slowly, humming his tunes. i was fairly calm, until the coffin cover was raised. 'reuben rodrigues, 20, r. i.p.' and then, something inside me snapped. something that has yet to mend eight years later.

i don't know where you are, reuben, but i hope to god you're singing.