Arsh Mahal diary – Day 9

It has been a day of revelations.

Did you know that in some parts of the world, not too far from where I live, you can barter your hair for steel vessels? Not just your hair but anyone's hair (human) that you may wish to painstakingly collect as a result of natural shedding, intentional shearing, stalking females in the neighbourhood and suchlike. Did you further know that a kilo may in fact fetch you something as eminently desirable as a oil-can?

I did not know this.

Did you further know that milk packets or random plastic slippers can purchase for you channa and palli-patana? That children in that very same part of the world that I speak of are encouraged to learn to look at disposable waste as synonymous with little afternoon treats? And such persons as do entice away from you your hair and plastics come regularly stalking the streets of this world, jiggling their plates and pans or vaunting their channas and peering through your doorway?

Thrilling as these newly acquired titbits of worldly knowledge maybe, they would not have been sufficient to excite this post in my present state of soreness.

It was something more. Today after decades of futile battle, an old and perhaps my foremost and most intense mind-worm has quite fortuitously been laid to rest!

When I was very little, perhaps even before I had learnt to talk properly, I happened to see something that thrilled me intensely. A man with a bandi -like contraption, surrounded by children, stretching out bands out hot-pink gooey substance into absurd shapes – animals, birds, wrist-watches, fingerings and handing it over to the clamouring children. And suddenly, incredulously, I realised that those things were edible. Those lucky children were eating their wrist watches! The thrill and the image stayed with me well into the time I had learnt to communicate reasonably. I repeatedly asked my mother about gooey pink parrots, eating your wrist watch, fantastic moustached-men who would make you some of your own, which you could gently slide into mouth and dispose of, if you grew weary of it. Frustratingly then, understandably now, she thought it was something I had seen in a dream. I think I also asked my father and sister but they were useless. It is intensely frustrating for a child to have to depend on adults for her gratification, but even more so not to be able to convince them of the existence of its source.

I thought longingly of pink parrots for several years, well into my girlhood. But as the pink memories blurred, I felt convinced too that it may merely have been a mid-summer noon’s dream. It seemed fantastic enough for it.

But today when the women of Arsh Mahal basti were enumerating the variety of their barter economy, one of them mentioned wrist-watches for old used-up notebooks. When I cocked a disbelieving brow she chuckled and said that they were just candy. Bells peeling madly in my head, I bombarded them with questions. I had found him! My magic- man who made candy-watches. If they were taken aback by the ferocity of my interest, they were equally sympathetic of the reason for it. I thanked them profusely and exacted a promise that they were all to keep a sharp look out for him and take me to him immediately as he is spotted anytime in the next week.

I am keeping my fingers crossed that the candy-man visits while I am still going to Arsh Mahal. But even if I don’t get myself my pink moustaches, I know at least that it has always been possible. Only, I hope my mother remembers what I am taking about so that I can at least have a ‘I told you so!'

Keeping with Urdu

My next was going to be an acerbic rant on the Ghazal in English. But that was before, in the very process of composing it, I succumbed too. The Ghazal is such a therapeutic form of verse that I realise that it must enormously tempt poets of temperament. The real poets of talent of course find no crutches in either language or form – but we don’t speak of those just here.

Since I am still embarrassed by my English attempt, I will give you instead a good old-fashioned recent one in Urdu. At least it will have the advantage of being quite incomprehensible to a majority of the people who will glance at it, while affording me the satisfaction of giving it a life beyond the bytes of a Word document.

Ye baad-e-tabaah sab raah barbaad kar jo chale

Shukr! Zahmat-e-intikhaab se aazaad kar jo chale

Abd-e-misr sa gumaan hota aaj kal humse

Dil-e-sang-e-giraan ko seene pe laad kar jo chale

Keysh se khuda tak ka faasla tai hoga kaise?

Pairon mein zanjeer-e-khudi saad kar jo chale

Gila tho nahi hai koi woh jo chale so chale

Zahan-o-dil ko roshan-o-aabbad kar jo chale

Koi gul na khila ab ke mausam-e-bahaar mein

Chale tho tamaam chaman nashaad kar jo chale

Ab kuch zabt ka tamasha bhi dekhajaye Zoya

Zor-e- vaheshat mein tarq-e-fasaad kar jo chale

A bewilderment of birds

Sheetal, my sister, keens the felling of a tree in a recent post. There are trees and there are trees; if we live long enough we learn that they are all impermanent. Wilful, deliberate destruction is hard to fathom and natural tragedies difficult to endure, but there is some perverse comfort in that these patterns of loss and reaction are universal and fractaled.

And so, Nemerov again.

Learning by Doing

They're taking down a tree at the front door,

The power saw is snarling at some nerves,

Whining at others. Now and then it grunts,

And sawdust falls like snow or a drift of seeds.

Rotten, they tell us, at the fork, and one

Big wind would bring it down. So what they do

They do, as usual, to do us good.

Whatever cannot carry its own weight

Has got to go, and so on; you expect

To hear them talking next about survival

And the values of a free society.

For in the explanations people give

On these occasions there is generally some

Mean-spirited moral point, and everyone

Privately wonders if his neighbors plan

To saw him up before he falls on them.



Maybe a hundred years in sun and shower

Dismantled in a morning and let down

Out of itself a finger at a time

And then an arm, and so down to the trunk,

Until there's nothing left to hold on to

Or snub the splintery holding rope around,

And where those big green divagations were

So loftily with shadows interleaved

The absent-minded blue rains in on us.

Now that they've got it sectioned on the ground



It looks as though somebody made a plain

Error in diagnosis, for the wood

Looks sweet and sound throughout. You couldn't know,

Of course, until you took it down. That's what

Experts are for, and these experts stand round

The giant pieces of tree as though expecting

An instruction booklet from the factory

Before they try to put it back together.



Anyhow, there it isn't, on the ground.

Next come the tractor and the crowbar crew

To extirpate what's left and fill the grave.

Maybe tomorrow grass seed will be sown.

There's some mean-spirited moral point in that

As well: you learn to bury your mistakes,

Though for a while at dusk the darkening air

Will be with many shadows interleaved,

And pierced with a bewilderment of birds. 

Because I wanted you to address me

Because I sometimes wonder in wonder

Because I sometimes think I know

Because some things are sometimes perfect

Because other things are almost true

Sometimes I think I may have found a poem

Sometimes else I know I have

Sometimes the world wakes up together

Sometimes I’d falter so nearly there

I’d like to know of wonder and world

I’d like to behold the perfect rose

I’d like to know if it is sometimes true

That there is a line between poetry and prose?

Because sometimes your love of a thing will make you conjure tricks to edge closer to it. Howard Nemerov’s poem “Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry” is such a thing.

For your pleasure and mine –

Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

--Howard Nemerov

Test post

Will this set right the problem?

Coerced into mourning

The Chief Minister died today. It was a dramatic death and somehow more disturbing for that. I was detached to begin with but got predictably somewhat sucked into the whirlpool of media-whipped misery. I was quite content to give up my whole morning for the occasion. I sat through the search and salvage operations and all the speeches of the important leaders and the reactions of the state. But around noon a strange thing began to happen. All the relief channels -ones I had been alternately flipping to when a news anchor had repeated a sentence about two-dozen times to a background of infinitely looping three second visuals - began to present blank screens one by one. It seemed strangely like an all-systems failure in a dying man. When all but the news channels were taken off air, I realised of course that they were being blocked. Now, I’ve never really resisted a two minute silence in my life and wasn’t about to do so then.

But that was then and this is now. It is evening, nay dusk. The day’s work is done, sadness has held its limited sway, and now I find I want my usual pleasures. I want my TV. But no, they inform me over the phone, the cable operator’s union has decided, they say, that it ain’t seemly. We are to continue like this for a whole day. I find that my empathetic benevolence has evaporated. This isn’t a channel that has decided to withhold its programming out of policy; now that would be its prerogative. But for an intermediary to stand between me and what is my right because it thinks it has the wherewithal to police my social conscience! I think it is coercion, and like most people, of all things it makes me want to rebel!

I will not be recommended an acceptable quantum of grief nor be forced to participate in a public one.

Apni tho ab tamaam huyee kayanaat-e-gham

Do ashq the jo deeda-e- tar se guzar gaye!

I will feel as much as I do, express or not as I choose and seek my relief where I will. Fie on those who would try and choose for me!

And till such time as the channels don’t come on I may as well sulk in misery.

A can of letters

At the outset, I must say that I cannot spell. Not too well anyway. I am reasonably alright under the aegis of Microsoft Word, but I am careful to write handwritten letters only to those who are obliged to love me unconditionally.

If you’ve lived in the same world that I have, you must have encountered those superbot parents who will spell out half their conversation when they have a kid in tow. Now those people are my worst nightmare. Visual assemblage of a string of data which has been received through auditory means is one of those tasks that turn my knees instantly to jelly. I think the stress of having to decode all that before the suddenly interested-looking child does, mulches already shaky faculties. But the result is that from a reasonably interesting conversationalist I turn into a blank-eyed zombie who is drawing figures in the air and asks when the joke’s punch line has arrived, “What was that again? W-H-O....”

Now random acquaintances can be acquitted of a desire to torture me. But what is to be made of a mother who after a lifetime of knowing me chooses to spell to me under the most trying circumstances? Let me explain-

The father has been out of town for a bit. His duties, amongst which is the nightly securing of the house, have fallen to me. One night, some nights ago, I was awoken by prodding on my shoulder and a hissed, “Shwetaa!” I opened my eyes to my mother’s insistent, “Did you lock all the doors?” I had, so I said sleepy-righteous, “Yes”. At which point, I think she mentioned that there was something in the house. She also said a few other things about doors and noises that I did not make perfect sense of. Now, my mother is ailurophobic so I assumed it was a cat, or not, and said so, preparing to get up and shout it away with the unflappable courage of the newly awakened, when she chose to start communicating via spelling. She threw a string of letters at me. My mind achieved a complete blank. I think I may have tried to repeat after her in a bit of a shriek because she was soon hushing me and repeating what she said. The fact that she hushed me seemed to register; my mind made the connection that she suspected that the intruder was in fact a human person. I settled down to decoding the Letter-Puzzle in peace because she was evidently getting irritated by my murmuring out loud. After a while I hazarded a guess, “Naake?” I whispered. Having decided there was no help for it my mother articulated in a piercing whisper, “Mace!” I got that. Oh! It was an M and not an N. I was happy to have that mystery cleared up. I was beginning to relax when she said, “Go and get it from your bag”. It occurred to me at that point to ask her why she thought four letters made less sound that one word, but my mother is not a nice person to rile at certain times.

I shimmied noiselessly off the bed to a corner where my hand-bags were. (I was rather pleased with my presence of mind in remembering which one to get and identifying it with a single touch!) I got out the can, opened the lid and waited, arm braced at the door. Once she had got me into this somewhat ludicrous position my mother seemed to think better of the situation. She repeated her question about the doors. I was perfectly sure they were locked, so what? It was just that she had heard a door swing softly and then swing again after about five minutes. I don’t quite know what she thought at that point (perhaps that if there was in fact a thief, he could not have withstood the allure of so much midnight conversation) because she left blithely to go use the bathroom, leaving me sitting at the edge of the bed with a can of pepper spray in a hand held aloft.

By the time she came back I had realised to my indignation that she had probably been misled by a certain window-door which has lately taken to pretending it is a real door with creaky noises and all. I tried telling her this in varying tones and verbiage lest the point escaped her, at which she only wondered why I was getting bothered and wouldn’t it be better for me to try and catch a little sleep?

It is difficult to capture sleep when you are feeling misused but it is one of the charming things about me that sleep can rarely evade me for long. I woke up rested and happy that morning and that midnight’s ordeal only came back to me just now because we are having a power cut and I could do with a little excitement.

Moral of the story: There is no thing so bad that a little spelling cannot make worse.