Swansong

A claustrophobic room. Mouthing the lyrics as if you were 20 again. The heady mixture of grass, lager, old friends and a receding hairline. Poignant guitar strains. For the times that were. Audacious Suman. Pensive Anjan. Bohemian Anindya. Dali-esque Chandrabindu poems. Moushumi Bhowmik, LRB (only one song, please), Arnab and his cute cute Shahana, Kalikaprasad. Remembering Rudra Mohammed Shahidullah. And walks in the rain. Or an autumn sky knowing that you'll be home tomorrow. The long conversations. The sheer madness to love. The misplaced courage to let go. The dead friends. None of whom had a die-able, viable age. Far away from the shopping malls. And faux-pas happiness. And libido. And appraisals. And the hassles of getting (or worse, being) married. Perhaps in Alabma. Or Kowloon. Or Gandhi Bhaban. Or BBC.

I don't really believe in gods, if her name is not Maa. Still, it feels warm from within that one day I will sing to one such gathering. And god will let me do that. Where I will sing for myself. Steal furtive glances to check if all my past ghosts are approving of me. One last hurrah before the curtains fall on the madness of not letting go.

Is that a lot to ask for?

White Noise

Ok, so you will tell me that I don't have a dime's worth knowledge of backingbin. Or JSF. Or wmA. Or stocks. Or debentures. Or Vuitton bags. Or Bahamas vacations. Or Micra wheels. Or promiscuity. Or how to make out with a girl in a pub. Or how being a gay feels. And then you will catch your breath (bashing me takes a lot out of you, still. Love, is it?) and with a foaming pair of pouty Angelina lips and the faint purple vein on your left temple throbbing like the ribcage of a 80-something rickshaw-puller you will spew out. That I am a lousy loser (you do love alliterating, don't you, bitch) and that I with my scalp showing through my keo-karpin-slathered wisps and my decadent right incisor and my unhyperactive sweat glands which do not ooze musky fluid- am not 1/10 a man as the strapping Cristiano Ronaldo lookalike at your office who loves scoring with married women. And all the while I will minutely observe how the dimple on your left cheek shows no signs of waning and how, somehow, even distantly so, you remind me of Gayatri Joshi. You will pick up my favorite Marquez and do a little salsa on it's left cover. You will tug at the chord of my awesome grainy television until the screen and its breaking news blares fizz into silence. You will kick away your left stilleto on my timid denims. But I will secretly lust after your heaving breasts. Or wonder how bad stretch marks will be on your Mila Kunis belly. Meanwhile, the non-jacuzzi will seethe you up. The spout will effuse forth. My non-MBA. My little magazine dreams. My Sachin Tendulkar gods. My Anjan Dutta orgasms. My ancient silence. That wraps an arm around me when you shout. Or when Maa gets sick. Or Baba coughs off into another Ritwik Ghatak night. Or when I dream of my dead friends. Or when I am scared. And you will sashay yet again into the bedroom. Manicured nails clutching Blackberry. Thonged libido seeking Ronaldo-clone. Perfect flossed incisors gnashing blue words. The door will slam. The last pressure cooker will whistle ouut. The last tomcat will fornicate. The last insomniac will recite manic Ginsberg. Or Shakti. Or Rabbi. The last 'worker' will wipe off her cheap mascara. The last lovelorn will cry into sleep. The wrapped arm will not let go of my married hand.

Why being twenty-eight sucks.........

1. You are balding/ growing a beer-paunch/ fussing over too much soda/ sugar in your diet.

2. You either stay with your parents or you dont; you're screwed both ways.

3. You are too young to follow Ramdev, too old to drool over Larissa Riquleme.

4. You can no longer down six pints of lager and still spell out an Icelandic volcano.

5. You suddenly notice that even Shahid Afridi is 30.

6. You sufer from insomnia and then get rapped on the knuckles for sleeping through projection-data-CRM mumbo-jumbo.

7. You hated the concept of GPA; now you hate the concepts of appraisal.

8. Your denims are attractive and flashy. Sadly, your eye-bags are not.

9. You haven't yet figured out what love is.

10. You already feel holding hands in malls is tacky. And overt.

11. You want to tear down everything mundane. And yet are afraid of change.

12. You realize that Maa is growing old. So is Baba. And you're going to be alone soon.

Kolkata half-baked dreams

I started off trying to write a poem. And as for many of my ventures, I failed. But mark my words, one day my keyboard will rhyme for you. For your potholes. For your communists; the enlightened and the confused. Because you can not do without a dose of red-smeared hypocriticism and nepotism that so go hand-in-hand. So, here is the first (and perhaps the last) 'chapter' of a thing that I am trying to put together for you, city!!!

Kolkata Half-baked Dreams:




6th May, 2009.


Opposite Caffeine, Gol Park

It rained. Hard and blinding and brief. Unusual squall for a mid-May urban day. As the drops pelted down upon the rickety tin buses and the squabbling auto-rickshaws and the archaic cabs of the yore and the adolescent motorcycles, I patiently waited. As the hydrants spewed tarry sewage and the associated paraphernalia of glistening gutkha wrappers, stubs of unfiltered, carcinogenic, uncouth, cheap Charminars pulverized by the gurgling muck, a couple of earthen bhaands in aimless ying-yan swirl, and a lonely used condom sticking out like the spent phalanx of a phantasmal lovemaking, I waited. As truant love-birds, sidewalk bastards, academic discards mayhemmed, launched paper fleets, danced topless, intertwined furtive fingers which occasionally touched fiery, taboo flesh, I waited. As the feuding mini-buses, the marauding 407s, the medieval hand-pulled rickshaws writhed, squirmed and wriggled through the orgies of existence and the pot-holes and first rains and earth smells and death-raced each other to respective destinations, I waited. As Ayudh’s ashes still floated down the polluted Buriganga, cosying against drained bottles of hooch, broken kolkes, dog carcasses and the rotting tuberose wreaths of the dead, I waited. In his city which was once mine. For a girl who was once his.

I wouldn’t have recognized Saanjh if not for her characteristic Madhu Sapresque sashay which she picked up God-only-knows-how from the grainy, flickering fashion shows of 21” B-W Keltron which occupied about 1/7 of the 6 * 8 room in Chetla which she shared with her parents and a scoundrel brother. Saanjh Mitra was born out of a failed contraceptive measure, as she loved to say. She was a girl, which translated into ‘one more idle mouth to feed and get married off to someone not a pimp or a rapist’ in her environs. More so because her father, a Communist by ideal and an accountant at a local grocer’s by practice, swore upon Sukanta’s promise of making this world more habitable for the kids and decided to practice celibacy till that happened. It never happened, her wife bore his fruit twice, and he had to work his ass out to provide for them. He silently brooded over his twin failures of a broken promise and his withering utopia. He never complained though, and instead supplemented the lack of dietary proteins with mouthfuls of poetry- from Whitman to Jibanananada, his trips were eclectic. And so, born into a smoggy Kolkata twilight, into a prosaic locality of long queues at the communal tube-well, starving, littering dogs, and domestic violence and crackling radios and rowdy Kalipuja and Durgapuja and Vishwakarmapuja carousels, Saanjh was christened so by her father, who brushed aside the traditional Annapurna, Protima or Karabi.

And, as good genes and bad luck would have it, much to her mother’s consternations Saanjh loved mathematics, poetry and the colour Red. She gave two hoots to mastering the business of stitching together petticoats for a local hosiery brand that her mother dabbled in to add to her father’s infinitisemal salary, shunned the company of the soap-opera ogling girls of her colony who sighed over the chest hairs of Chiranjeet and Prasenjit and the nasal soprano of Kishor Kumar clones, never leafed through Prasad, Nabakallol or any damndest Bengali magazines if not for poetries, summarily ignored the cat-calls, whistles and sexual and romantic innuendos of drain-pipe-trousered, fish-net-vested, wiry-biceped, grease-slickened matinee Bhola, Pocha or the slightly chic Rocky of her paara.

Going much against the run of the domestic sewing-machines, she aced her class in the municipal high school where the teachers were more interested in bunking classes than the students, and gate crashed into the hallowed porticos of Presidency. On a full tuition waiver. To study Mathematics. Good she did. Where else would she have met Ayudh?

Campus folklore has it that Ayudh Sen Chowdhury, the bespectacled (the best pair of frames from G K Opticals, Ballygunge), fair-skinned, pink-lipped, guitar-strumming, Dylan-humming, Lake Place resident fell in love with Saanjh over her colourful orations in the Canteen where she borrowed liberally from her list of after-dusk expletives which would put any guy to shame, and also from nondescript little magazine ideas. However, going by his hyperactive hormones and her lithe dusk-skinned, pout-lipped, kohl-eyed, perfect-breasted figure, both of which have hordes of students vouching for, it was lust that rather paved the way for this alliance. Add to it Saanjh’s natural inclination towards numbers and Ayudh’s innate nonchalance towards anything distantly curricular, and no wonder Ayudh clung on so dearly to his lady love or lust, whatever you may term it.

“Kire Neel? Ki khobor? What’s cooking”? The reverie was broken. I could just make out a whiff of Chanel. Oh yes, Saanjh had come a long way. But more of that later.

People say grief can turn you into idiots. Standing in the rain I thought the theory was totally retro. Or perhaps it was not. We really were playing the parts of idiots. It was barely a couple of days since Ayudh had died. Yes he did. He was all of 26. More of that later.

And here was Saanjh, his muse and I, his accomplice in numerous escapades, walking in the rain towards the Caffeine nestled in between Grub Club and Amber take-away.

His favourite haunt. Across His zebra-crossings and His traffic lights. His paper-mâché coasters. His ceramic mugs. His framed Garfield strips. His Café Negro. His Cappuccino Grande. His greasy chicken nuggets. His loosely-strung guitar. His stunned hearts. His dried tears. His starched, Chanel-ed, vermillioned, impregnated ex-girlfriend. His irritated best mate. His breathing poetries. His Dylan Thomas. His Sreejato. His Saanjhbaati. His Akashneel. His broken links. He was this close to playing God. He so is not here.

“Saanjh, you should have made it to his house before they took him away. Kakima was asking for you”.

“Saanjh, you should meet at least meet with Kakima once, she needs that.”

“Saanjh, do you miss Che? Motorcycle Diaries? Boolean Algebra? Marijuana swigs? The day we decided to launch a radio station for the insomniac, suicidal and the prostitute?”

“Saanjh, will you name your unborn foetus Ayudh? Even if for a second? So that he is born into poetry?”

“Saanjh, Ayudh died. I am scared. This city is no longer mine. Shred it into pieces. Distribute the pieces among the leper, the love-child and the love-lorn.”

“Saanjh, shed a tear. For God’s sake. Ayudh is dead.”

No quivering lips. No trembling hands. No choked larynxes. No nauseating longings.

The unsaid words crawled all over the place. Traipsed over the acrid coffee smell. Into the manicured nails manoeuvring the mobile phone. Whirring it, buzzing it, typing texts. The syllables animated the weary fingers rubbing the bloodshot eyes and porcupine stubble and acetic eyelids. Two mannequins, layered in Levis, Fabindia, Ray Ban, dog-eared Nike, Dr Scholl’s’ pumps. Enacting the charade of familiarity. And grief and conversation in a faux-pas bistro in a faux-pas cosmopolis. Nothing is said. Nothing is asked. The blowing AC circulates no apparent torment. Perfect harmony.

The last sip trickles down the gullet. Tasted like gasoline. Pity Ayudh can’t taste this. Would have puked. Would have been fun. Madhu Sapre in Chanel next to me stirs. Swift flick of wrists. Pays check. Tips. Plumbs deep down into the Gucci bag. God, isn’t she RICH nowadays!!! Fishes out a papyrus from the forgotten times. When Ayudh was alive.

“Neel, Ayudh wanted you to have this. I’ve been carrying this albatross for many lives now, it seems.”

“What is this”? Even though I know it in my bones.

“No idea, a letter perhaps. He wanted me to give you this if he died before you. I don’t think he meant so soon. You know, how humongous an emotional bastard he was. And how he loved writing……”

“Yes, he wanted to get published”.

“You bet. And now he’s gone! I believe his ‘omnibus’ is still hidden somewhere. For posterity. But for whom?”

Sepulchral silence. The first quiver. The first sting. The first acid rain.

We step out.

A pair of leaden Kolkata skies implode into a zillion Ayudh droplets.

The last love story.......

1990: Andreas Brehme, Rudi Voeller, Lothar Matthaeus and two red cards shatter the hopes of a 8 year old following a genius freak on a grainy television. First brush with the tears of a God.

1994: Ephedrine, a booming left-footer against Greece, a genuflect genius wearing the Argentine blue, bitter bitter taste of a failed affair, first brush with the tears of an adolescent. Et tu , Maradona??

2010: Back home after a long time. Bright lights big city lonely roads. City of lost flames, friends and football. Hoping against hope that the fire flares up. Clutched rosary. Clenched fists. Overflowing lachrymals. 4 -0. The death yet again of an infected heart. That had re-learnt the art of loving. Alone yet again. The pitched roads. The drizzling skies. The rickety buses. The doldrums. My God has deserted me yet again.

Diego Armando Maradona, you beauty...........thanks for everything. I will not love anymore.