Everything that begins...

Three years ago, in Bombay. Café Ideal, five in the evening of a balmy day, sitting by the window listening to the waves and watching the traffic go by. Put ten bucks in the jukebox and then another ten and then another and then another till there is half an hour’s worth of Kishore-RD magic lined up. Order a beer. The place is still half empty and so you can play RD comfortably. In another hour or so, it will move to Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, and in another hour, devolve to Kumar Sanu. Sit by the window, watch the waves splash, watch the easy traffic flow.

I was just out of college, a young English literature graduate head full to bursting with the Great Indian Novel I was destined to write in the coming years; meanwhile earning my beer by taking on freelance reporting jobs with whichever newspaper would commission one or whichever newspaper Professor Gupta could get to give me one. Jeans, khaadi kurtas, long hair parted in the center, beard. I was so entranced with myself that I was not merely creating characters, I was living one. As the great comedian once said, I did not just brood, I brooded at the world. The melancholy of Kishore and RD (aided a lot by Gulzar) was a perfect fit. And so I would come to Ideal around 5 in the evening, get a beer, play Kishore, read some and listen to the waves splash. And then I would just drink as the café slowly drifted into Morrison and then Sanu territory. Except, this evening it doesn’t. Not till six, not till seven, not till seven thirty. RD plays, Kishore sings, the jukebox keeps going. And so I call the waiter, and ask. And he says that she is the one playing. And as I turn to look at her, she stands up from her table and turns and all I see is a mop of shoulder-length, wavy black hair. She leaves.

How clichéd.

***

Sunday through Thursday I wait there everyday and listen to Dylan and Morrison and nothing happens. And then, Friday evening, just as I am about to take the first sip on my beer, she slips onto the bench in front of me.

‘Waiting for someone?’

I just stare. I don’t know that she is her at this point, but I am already captivated.

‘He told me’, she says, pointing to the waiter who has answered my question every evening with a polite ‘No, Sir’, ‘What are you drinking?’

‘Budweiser.’

‘That is donkey piss’, she says and orders a Kingfisher for me. She has taken charge of the evening.

She speaks to me, I imagine we speak of music and writing and our shared love of RD and Kishore and the Mangeshkar sisters. I say I imagine we spoke of them because she agreed to meet me again, and then again and again, and those things, I imagine, do not work out because you have stared at her for three and a half hours straight, evening after evening, too enthralled by her smile, her eyes, the curl of her lips as she twisted them ironically in response to some stupid comment I might or might not have made, her laughter…ohh her laughter! Her laughter, like they said in the clichés, like the gurgling of brooks, like the chimes of the wind chime you put in your doorway, like that magical, melodious sound you hear so often in literature but never in movies; because no human person in front of a camera can ever pretend to having that kind of laughter; she just laughed with me that night and a hundred more nights and we listened to Kishore and Lata and Asha and RD and Gulzar and we created a world in a place aptly called Café Ideal with the waves listening to us and us listening to the waves and we both believed the world was, and would be beautiful…

On reading books new and old

So, I was having a chat with a friend about a non-fiction book I am reading. And as I paraphrased some interesting bits from the book for her, she got interested into the book, and while chatting with me, searched for the book on Amazon. It turns out that the book (which, by the way, is a history of one of the most important corporate and one of the biggest brands in the world today) was available in unused/new edition at around a $20 price point, a few used books were available for around $1. This was where things got interesting.

My first response, of course, was to ask her to buy the used book, as it was not a historically significant or important book or a rare edition. It was a mass market paperback. Then she told me about the book’s description: dog-ears, class notes, margin-notes and so on. I immediately almost demanded that she buy a new, unmarked copy of the book. 

And this, of course, turned the discussion to why we buy books and how we read them. My stance (any friend agrees) is this: I would never buy a pre-read/annotated non-fiction work, while I would always prefer a read/secondhand/used fiction classic. As we reflected on this seemingly odd choice, we realized it had nothing to do with how we see the aesthetics of the books or how we receive books as physical objects, but deeper implications on how we read books.

When we read non-fiction, we are primarily dealing with facts and the author’s opinion/interpretation of them. In that case, if I don’t agree with the author, there are already two voices speaking in my head even as I try to digest the author’s theses- her and mine. Reading an annotated/highlighted/margin-noted copy of the book just throws a third voice in the mix. And this causes complications, especially in situations where both the annotator and I disagree with the author. Troubling questions arise: Is it just me disagreeing with the author and the annotator an interested party who also happens to disagree? Is his disagreeing with the author affecting my opinion? What if the author is right but I don’t see it because it is a 2:1 opinion poll? The same thing applies where the author, the annotator and I agree. How much of my agreement is due to the annotator agreeing with the author? Is my opinion being pre-shaped? Reading used/previously owned non-fiction books can cause problems.

Contrastingly, when it comes to fiction, I tend to prefer used books. There is nothing which matches the joy that I feel when I come across a particularly moving passage and find that someone else has also read it and loved it with the same fervor that I do. It is a sort of sharing that any day beats quoting my favorite lines on twitter or facebook and seeing 30 people respond to them as they identify with those lines. There is a very simple reason. The person who highlighted those lines in the book I am now reading had the context, the bigger picture of the lines, which the people who like the shared lines on social media might be lacking. That makes for a singular feeling of a deeper, richer joy of finding something discovered commonly which is simply, in my opinion, not possible with social media or ebooks.

Anyway, that is my take on reading new or old books. I would love to have your views on this subject so close to my heart.

Nights Like These

Nights like these, I

worry about what I chase, or think I do-

something unknown, or known- something that

turns me into a monster or a dog. What do I work for? What

do I stand for? Where do I stand in relation to

any one other person? Is there any one other person?

Nights like these, I scribble bad poetry, without rhyme, without

thought, just a morose, pitiful angst against what I am- dark nights that

call on me to stay awake, dark

nights that offer no answers. A soul, love, comradeship, acquired

luxuries, all-so who am I? I ask the question of silent nights and

they have no answers. Nor to noisy fans in seedy hotel rooms, nor do

the swishing tires of the ever moving car or the blazing lights of

my laptop monitor.

I am nobody. I have no one.

(Interesting hypothesis, sneers my logical self).

Reading books on beaches

Walking on loose sand in flip-flops builds character as opposed to walking on tightly packed sand still being lashed at by the tide. Have you ever noticed that the last and most successful incursion of the tide leaves slight, wavy outlines drawn in slightly more grainy sand over other finer sand, wavy much in the same way as the curves of the lines a child draws clouds in. And that the sea when it goes back leaves a fine meshwork of lines in the sand forming grids shaped like spindles or crescents or what have you, occasionally pockmarked with the tiny burrow holes of the very small sand crabs which scuttle around. As you walk around sometimes the tide will wash across your ankles and calves and when you turn back you see that the footprints you had left in the sand have been washed away which is absolutely fine with me, not being much of a footprint leaver/follower anyway.

The first time I take the 30 minutes’ walk on this beach looking for a quiet place where I can just sit down and read it is eleven in the afternoon and the sun beats down heating the sand under my feet and the air around me and boils all the snark filled up inside of me so that I feel a strange, selfish, and I am sure far from unique sense of antipathy towards these people frolicking around, cooling themselves in the water or tanning themselves on the beach. Those young men throwing balls at each other and laughing their joy as the sand flies in sprays where their feet hit the ground, the mother with their children standing at the very edge of the surf and letting out Kilgorish whoops of joy as the sea laps at their ankles or sometimes going as far up as their calves, the middle aged, the other children who are running everywhere, occasionally bursting into sounds like firecrackers set loose randomly,  balding men who lie on deck chairs amid their rolling layers of fat, like beached whales, their pale bellies generously slopped with suntan oils/creams with spare bottles lying around just in case more is needed, their mouths open, gaping at the world as if they are inhaling the sound of the surf through their mouths- in that instant I hate them all. I hate them for enjoying themselves so much, I blame them for the fact that their vacations seem to be going just according to plan while I want just one simple thing from my vacation and that is to read a book in a quiet beach side bar with a bottle of beer at my elbow and for having walked for thirty minutes in this heat without having found one quiet place to do so. At that moment I blame them for everything that is wrong with the world. And a minute after that I realize how mean and petty and cheap and selfish I am being and something that is very much like shame seems to wash down on me. A few minutes after that I find my quiet place.

Just for the record, the novel I am reading is Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and as I dive into it, Stephenson’s gleeful snark at pop culture while ironically writing a novel about major factions of that pop culture seems to perfectly complement my snark from a few minutes ago- right from the moment where he introduces his main protagonist as The Deliverator to his descriptions of the pizza delivery industry as the most intensely competitive one in the world to the moment where we come to know that the protagonist is called just that: Hiro Protagonist.

But I started off writing this not intending to make this an essay on what I feel about beach vacations or Snow Crash. I like reading on beaches and do so whenever I get the chance to just plop myself on the beach. My favourite adventure sport while on vacations is plonk myself right there on a chair or just a towel, listen to the sea and immerse myself into whatever book I am reading at that moment. The sounds of the sea soothe me and mostly I don't mind even if there are people around, though it is better if they are not.

I have always had an intense fascination for the sea, having always found some sort of awful majesty even in the dirty waters of Juhu- I have written awful poems about it, essays that do not express ten percent of what I feel when there, I have read stories and novels which have attempted to tell me what their authors feel about being there, but in the end listening to the sea is something which cannot be done with someone else's ear- that is like trying to have a spontaneous conversation with the services of a translator. Or like listening to someone else read a book. The best way to know what it is like, you have to go there and listen to it just like to really read a book, you have to really read it. The sea tells you things, I imagine it tells all of us of different things. The only way to know what it tells you is to go to it, close your eyes for a moment and listen.

Somehow, I have always thought it is the same with books. Someone (I think DFW) once said that every writer begins with writing in someone else's voice, then slowly she finds her feet and her voice becomes her own. I have always felt much the same about reading. When we first begin reading, we read with someone else's eyes: either taking the author literally as she has written it, or reading in the words of the author the validation or condemnation of the critic whose review we read before reading the book and then, finally, when we are really reading, we read the book in its own words, with our own eyes and then the books begin to tell us things. They begin to sing to us, their voices telling us stories which might be found in the pages of the books but which are as much inside our head. Much like the sea. And that is the secret of all things in this world, isn't it? The secret of all things holy and what makes reading or going to the sea or writing or living a holy experience? That going to a beach or reading a book or living a life is not about going to the beach or the story of the book or the legacy of our life at all. It is about the stories that form- what the sea tells us, what stories that book leaves in our head, what we take in as we live our lives.

P.S.: I might have forgotten to mention that the female protagonist of Snow Crash is a girl called Y.T. which stands for Yours' Truly.

Residuals

Scary thought: there are words, sentences even. But no stories can be found.

Lack of coherence and purpose. A litany of activity that is reduced to mere chores. Colours fading independently and into each other, dull, rusty, helpless, themselves tainted with age. Loneliness masquerading as solitude. Scary thought: somewhere in all the words, conversation was lost.

Ersatz memories substituting for desires, second string players moving incoherently in a ballpark. Where did everyone go, when did we lose everything? Cold comfort for change-

What is left? Inside is a great cold hard ball which refuses to melt.

Nothing?

One day, all this heartbreak will erupt as a sharp, shooting pain in the chest, a blinding fireball of horror made of all the unbearableness of life and for a moment everything will be black and then he will be back in his greatgrandpa’s village, lying on a cot by the edge of a mango orchard and the sun will be a painted crimson disc in the far sky framed by inky clouds and a gentle breeze will caress his lined face and a single songbird will trill into the dusk. And then, there will be peace.