A Blog Once Was

Circus of the Sun - Chapter 2 - Cling's Childhood

2008-04-01T18:09:00.001+07:00

I owned a past that appeared to be eternally engaged in a deliberation – one about constantly weighing its amassed fortunes against the many detrimental misfortunes it had plunged into, over the period of my existence till date. Very Often, with a strange regularity the latter voted out the former and I would, in the end, acknowledge with an accompanied sigh that my constant grumble about those rather ordinary losses’ were a validation of being ‘just plain’- a plain regular guy who was as vulnerable to deceptions as he was indefensible to enticements… who was as equally dumb and evenly sensible as any other man of his age… and by establishing such an understanding before my own conscience I would find a vindication that would soon drag my thought onto something as astray and uncommon as my name –My name is Cling and for a long, long time, I couldn’t believe it!

I never really had the chance to ask my folks whatever that prompted them to call me Cling because by the time I learned to ask ‘Why’, one had made her choice to run away with a man who played trumpets for a living in some far away state, while the other party to my production had decided to embark on a journey that as per his claim would provide him with the ‘purpose’ of his birth. I always suspected that he had gone searching for his wife either to avenge for a thrashed ego or probably to appreciate a choice well made, in both of the cases, only never to return. My grandfather took care of me from then on, but his decrepit solitude had occupied his mind largely enough to care less about my name and any thoughts about changing it. I was henceforth to be called Cling and it was left up to me to have gotten used to it. I did and quite successfully at that.

Growing up was difficult at a time when a dampening economy persuaded one to renounce school and take up a mean job in the neighborhood. I was barely 10 years old when (after an indoctrinated advice from a relative) my grandpa decided time had come for me to hold a bulldog wrench and walk to work. Confronted by an unsettling senility he believed that in the event of his death I would be rendered hapless before a world that was filled with reluctant cannibals.

‘I can’t leave you to them and go just like that. I am not talking about survival, I know you would, but it’s about how you do it. ’ As a 10 year old I mugged up those words in the hope of understanding it later at a time when words would become friendly.

Luck had it this way that my grandpa wouldn’t die until my 19th birthday but the years that we lived along were as memorable as they were miserable.

My first day at job was not really pleasant. There is a limit to the mental mutilation a 10 year old boy can undergo, I believe. I had been subjected to some uncanny remarks about my deserted childhood and the owner of the workshop, a hefty old man who was severely empathetic towards my grandpa strongly believed in the cosmic consequences of a wrong birth. He claimed that if I weren’t born in 1963, more so not on June 4th, things would have been vastly different and my family would have remained intact.

“…I like your old man. He is clear in his mind…Sad that he got one seed like you there. You better stick to your job strictly and don’t mess around with the kids in the neighborhood or I would forget I was kind to that old guy. And don’t cry about your wage, ever!”

For someone who was persuaded to give up school and his juvenile romance for the larger cause of survival, the start was ominous. I decided to stay on though.

… to be continued

Circus of The Sun - Chapter 1- Lucifer and the Lady

2008-02-07T16:25:00.001+07:00

I couldn’t hold myself from asking her that question.

“Why do you always sleep with men who are younger to you?”

“Because I did not grow up after 27” She shrugged while saying this which I thought was an attempt to hide the vulnerability within.

We were waiting for the last train of the day and it was freezing cold. I was in a blue pullover with Old Navy written over it. The food shop outside the station, which reminded me of a decrepit bodega in some old English movie, was still on and a few bystanders were taking heat from the fire prepared by the security guards at the nearby building. They were all engaged in a conversation which, from their actions, seemed to me about the unusual cold that had rendered the city immobile for the last couple of days. That’s how accurately nature plays its tricks. Just as people (the whole 2% of the country’s population that sees a point in whining and complaining mindlessly) were directly or indirectly getting involved in discussions about a skyrocketing Sensex, a cold wave somewhere in the north-western border decided to bother their routine.

My name is Lucifer and I met this lady at a local pub not far away from the station. She had come in with a tall and heavily built ‘gargantuan’ guy who was cautiously scanning his surroundings from the door. They had moved onto the corner couch which sat farthest from the club’s lights. While doing so she had stepped over my right foot and spontaneously evened it out by saying ‘keep them intact honey- bunny’. I found it rude and offensive though I decided to silently nod my head as an indication of dismissing the joke. She walked without even recognizing my reaction and I kept staring at her all the way till her seat. I was alone at mine and she was partially facing me as she sat on her seat. The pub mostly played songs of 80’s band. This guy who runs it, Nigel, is my friend’s neighbor and is supposedly the oldest and the most active member of a perishing Deep Purple community in the city. He is 74.

“The invasion of house music has kicked the old bugger’s in the ass. City smells of chemical trance these days; it doesn’t rock and roll anymore.” A customer at the table nearby was yelling out to his companion seated next to him. The drink had gotten him it seemed. I was still occasionally throwing my eyes at the lady who stepped on my toe. She was apparently engaged in a stone-sober conversation with her atrociously huge companion and threw her hands up in the air quite often. In appearance she was short thin and dusky, with her eyes too wide for the black to veil the glint of it’s white. I wondered how the two would look in bed if at all they bothered to take it till there. The frequency of her throwing the hands up in the air seemed to catch up and I was assuming a story for them when my favorite song started playing.

It's been a long time since the book of love,
I can't count the tears of a life with no love.
Carry me back, carry me back,
Carry me back, baby, where I come from.

For some unfathomable reason the song had remained with me ever since my graduation party at college. Seven years had passed since then and I can hardly remember the names of most of the guys who gave their speeches. Rarely do I think about those days and scarcely do I wonder what must be up with many of them. It’s just that this song has remained and every time the record played I got this coalesced smell of sweat cigarette and spirit.

I must have been singing a little too loudly, at least for this lady in the corner couch because from the moment I started singing till the time I ended she was regularly throwing her eyes at me, amidst keeping her conversation alive.

The memory of a last stint in bed with the opposite sex was slowly fading from my head and I had been having sleeveless errands with women of lately. The pressure of remaining at the office and meeting up with delegates from across the world, convincing them through the development proposals, talking them into institutional investments, wiping their asses for the third world’s good till midnight and many similar biddings had taken away the little space that remained for such thoughts. I was a busy man (at the least on the face of it) who had stifled his perversions and prenuptial rides for a livelihood. This was the case on weekdays as well as weekends indistinctively until I decided to quit and be on my own. Proactively I set up a photo studio on the west end of the city and deliberately stopped worrying about a slumping income since it fed me and my little tenacities like visiting this pub twice a week. The relief was that I was adequately away from the madding crowd and various distractions in the city, including sex.

The guy who had accompanied this lady into the pub left abruptly and my intuition told me that he wouldn’t return. I made no attempts to bother her in anyway but I had consciously decided that I wouldn’t leave the place before she did.

It must have been quarter to mid-night when she rose to leave. I had to gulp through my last mug to make sure that we made the exit together. I let her walk before me through the door and as she took the stairs down I followed. It appeared to me that she was conscious of my presence behind but I couldn’t be sure of it till she repeated the lyric of the song I earlier sang

Carry me back, carry me back,
Carry me back, baby, where I come from

She turned around and winked at me which, I suppose, was her idea of conveying her inebriety. I just smiled back but refused to reply.

“It’s a circus isn’t it?” She jimmied in with a question that I couldn’t comprehend. We were now on the street where traffic was slowly dying. The guard at the gate wished me a wonted goodbye.

“What is?” I asked her in an attempt to pry a meaning.

“The day and the night is a circus of the sun, isn’t it? It brings to me clowns like him and you”

I felt highly infracted by this presumptuous comment and I retorted with an inquiring ‘excuse me’.

She would repeat it verbatim with the same crudity but I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Lady, I am trying to be polite with you but I would want you to consider the fact that I am an equally or a slightly more tosspot as you are and that your comments about me isn’t getting well appreciated here.” I said with my forefinger shooting my head.

“What is the scariest thing you can do to a lady like me?” She had a strange way of snapping and every time she did that her eyes gleamed of some inscrutable pleasure.

“I have no intentions to scare you but I am offering to walk you till the taxi stand and see you off to your home”

“Father, into your hands I command my spirit” as she ran up to me and stood a feet apart with a mimicked innocence of dying Jesus I realized was being teased and surprisingly felt good about it.

We started walking towards the north end of the street in the hope of catching a taxi and out of curiosity I inquired,

“Where is your mate who walked in with you? Is he goanna come back looking for you there?”

“The night is cold and people are evil. He wouldn’t return but you can’t be sure!” I couldn’t understand

“The clown?” I inquired with a smirk on my face

“Just another” She retorted with no trace of emotion on her face. The street lights had cast a shadow on her left cheek. Her eyes were still bright and visible.

When she asked how often did I visit this pub I replied “I am a regular. Twice a week at least. I haven’t see you here yet? ”

“My first” She replied.

I called out for a taxi at the north end. As the driver drew close I asked her where she stayed.

“Till the nearest station. My train is from there” It sounded to me as a highly vulnerable tone and I reconfirmed it by asking if it was necessary she took a train

“I love to travel in trains at night”

“But it’s not safe I warned”

“Come with me then.” She smiled and I would soon escort her to the station permuting in my mind the wild possibilities the night held.

… to be continued…

Tickin' Away

2007-06-09T18:47:00.004+07:00

I sit on my chair and stare outside the window, into a distance that houses trees and bricks, the latter more prominent. The city rests in a subdued dream admist the mocking thrush of a crow -"teasing my town for its alien silence?" I refuse to ask. The clouds are waiting to fall. It may rain any moment and my tea is hot.

High in the sky, as grey beats white, I take a trip into a withering past least visited. Faces appear and disappear. I am amused at their numbers. Some of them don't bother me any more. The wispy few are too far away. Safe. Safer in my absence. The sudden smell of dust reminds of my home - how i used to run to the loo when the muddy green van from school stopped at my gate, and how the surly driver blew it's horn, a sign of his haste. They would never let me go.

"Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day

You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way

Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town

Waiting for someone or something to show you the way" - Song Playing

An ant then runs over my tea cup. I beat him gently with my forefinger. Once. Twice. Thrice. Down on the table , caught unaware and running in delirium- the emmet. I imagine crushing him with my thumb and then spared him from torture. I must let him go . A lesson learnt late. I am learning to refrain.

As the last ring of smoke was defiled by a gentle breeze from east, I drop the butt and take the first sip from my cup. It burns my lip but i ignore the pleasure. My friend is here and his accent speaks "ah be late toonait. ma gals 'ick" I pass the key and refuse to ask anythin about his sick girl. I dont know her name. He leaves.

I can see a lady on a terrace quite far. She is waiting for the rain I am sure. I decide to watch - every move she makes, every turn she takes. I count her steps and imagine waving my hands at her. I laugh at the innocence of a jerk and look down on my table. The ant is gone and my tea is cold.

"Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain

You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today

And then one day you find ten years have got behind you

No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun".. song playing

It did not rain. Not till midnight.

Lawrence Growing - Chapter One

2007-04-27T17:43:00.000+07:00

The village called ChandanMukku could always be described on singular terms. One bus stop, one clinic, one temple one school and one tailor. The list is not exhaustive but a fairer picture would have looked like a muddy land housing a nine hundred odd multitude that was divided by caste creed and color but united in its ill-treatment of women. Janaki's mother was the latest victim. She died while milking the cow. Many said that it denied her the seventh pregnancy.

The khadi clad leader at the Jansakthi house did not know how to react. He was disappointed when he heard the news but he had volunteered mass vasectomy in the North because the then food minister had announced that the rate at which people ate was proportional to the rate at which they copulate and there was not enough bread in the country. The declaration was generous enough for the welfare minister, a lady with short hair, to announce compulsory corking of human genitals. But when men defied cutting their tubes, then someone had to die – thanks to the predominant patriarchy, it always had to be a mother or the child she carried and it was always up to this man and his army (another thousand dolts who perfectly replicated him in ignorance and incompetence) to make that choice, but this time thankfully the cow helped.

When Prakash walked into this village for the first time [that was ten years ago when his first child was barely eight] he had a mission to accomplish - to clean up the political system in the state. He knew he had to start it from ChandanMukku. This was where his father served as the post master for ten odd years. So he abandoned the plan to appear for the Civil service examination and joined the local school instead. This served two purposes - one, he saved himself the shame of failing to clear the test fourth time in a row and two, it gave the lower primary students a math teacher. The latter purpose though did not serve for long because at school he mostly slept his time away, so as to stay awake in the night. In the night he would sit at the local press and prepare scripts about fundamental rights and standard wages. Most of the ideas were stolen from a book about an influential socialist manifesto that was gaining grounds in Russia and Poland.

Now as he drifted back in retrospective, he felt that the past had treated him and most of his cleansing attempts fairly. The red naxalites by now had a grip on the working tribe and the honey collector was the latest member to join this undercover group of men. The construction worker's at Sasankan Contractor's bridge site had started talking about secularism and feudalism during their tea breaks. They were building this overpass across a river that was anyway shallow enough for a five year old to cross over by walking. Yet this was necessary since vote banks were built on the number of such concrete structures – just on the numbers, not on the cement–metal mix. This was also what Prakash hated the most when he first walked in. His gang of beedi-smokers had everything (wish will and manpower) but money to build such arches. So the gang tactfully decided to takeover the local press and started printing pictures of a hammer, sickle and star. The first few years were tough considering the staggering level of illiteracy in the village and the inability of the inhabitants to distinguish A from V. His wife, Neelima, had a major role to help the reds out of this first significant adversity. She bought a slate for every household in the locality and taught them to write their names and draw pictures. For Radha, the tailor’s wife, it was difficult to distinguish letters from pictures. Gradually, along with 20 other ladies and their husbands from around the village she had started reading essays about how working late in the fields exposed men to snakes and women to rape.

It was at this venue that Laurence first met Janaki. She had come to hand over a stitched bloused to a lady in the group. Laurence was there to check out how his neighbor’s new bicycle that was creating waves in the village - Until then people mostly used carts to commute. As soon as Janaki walked in he had shifted his focus to this ten-something girl who apparently had no clue about what was going on at the scene. She had noticed Laurence staring at her but ignored him owing to several warnings her mother had issued to her ever since reaching puberty. “Boys would try all the tricks to lay their hands on you, never even look at them for the next four years.” She could remember the words verbatim. Laurence did not have a clue and so he kept on staring at her every time she came out of the shed – once to clean her feet of the mud and next to spit the water that cleaned her mouth.

Later he followed her till her home, hoping that she would return his looks somewhere on the way. Though the attempt ended in a damp squib the decision to walk her till her hut turned out to be politically correct if not just lucky – because it would help him from an introduction later on and lucky because an hour after the two kids left the scene, police raided the hut and shot dead Neelima and two other members of the red naxalite gang. That was the first gun shot the village had heard after the white men left the country.

[end of Chapter 1]

Laurence Growing - Foreword

2007-04-19T15:48:00.000+07:00

Laurence grew up in a family of seven. He was the second in line and the only legitimate child according to his grandma. Laurence never believed this, for majority is what the rule says.

So when all six of his siblings had a diluted rush in their veins and all of them had something in common (color, short nose, lone hair on the temple) 'that' had to be legitimate and not the sixth finger on his right hand. Whatever this debate was about, it took place in the early fifties when his country had just gained independence from a bunch of white men who were anyway fed up of ruling the country. Some claimed freedom came after a man of thin frame walked from north to south proclaiming salt is free and caste comes secondary. Other's acclaimed this march but insisted that the whites left because they were running out of funds to run this huge country. Laurence never understood freedom and the revival stunts of a khadi party and its pedagogues often confused him. He was still under ten, when he first heard of a red naxalite gang that smoked beedis along with arrack at the chess club near the Devi temple. Naushad, his friend, learnt his history lessons from one of their members. History was what amused Laurence the most. He knew little about his country and even less about how Marykunju married his father. She was the mother of the 'other six'. His mother died when he was four leaving behind a daisy chain of unfinished fairy tales. Of all that she taught him, he could only remember the one wherein the frog kissed the queen. He remembered how she held all the five fingers together and touched his lips to explain a kiss. Her face had an indistinct shape that was difficult to imagine. All he could reminisce was how those fingers smelt of fish curry. The memory often made him hungry.

His father first went to jail on the day he turned 14. By then the Red Naxalite gang were much talked about in the state. Their leader used to release leaflets about how Bolshevik party seized power in Russia. Very soon one of their members was made to lick the boot of a constable before he was shot dead in the jungle.

His father was jailed for painting the local zamindar’s wall red. Of all the colors, red! His father was illiterate and a reclusive kind, more so after his marriage to Marykunju. He never knew that red was banned in the state and only crappers could use the color.

The cops, as his father told him later on, behaved well with him that day because he was the village’s lone painter and the head constable at the local station was building a new house near Janaki’s tailor shop. Janaki was the tailors daughter. The story ahead is about Laurance and Janaki and how the red Naxalite party won the elections in the state.

[Chapter 1, due in a week's time]

Boast Of Quietness

2007-01-16T20:07:00.000+07:00

Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.

The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.

Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like to
understand them.

Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.

Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.

They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of that same poverty.

They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,
the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.

Time is living me.

More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.

They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.

My name is someone and anyone.

I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive

By Jorge Luis Borges