In Colour

It’s all in super slow motion. Amir is running, but not too fast, on a brown dry narrow patch of land. On both sides of the path, there are lush green fields – without end, the sun shining majestically above.

He feels like a marathon runner, about to complete his final lap, almost reaching the finishing line, the slow, lazily moving surroundings accentuating the feeling of triumph. Not only this, there are a countless number of people on the boundary of the path as well, held away from Amir by a strong, taut rope, the sort one sees at such races.

And like the races, most of those people look frantic, trying to reach out desperately, extending their hands just to have a touch or grab at the centre of attention – Amir. There are others too, who stand quietly by the side, just watching him pass by. Some look angry and some forlorn, gazing at him through the emptiness in their eyes. He can even see a woman holding a handkerchief in one hand, wiping away her tears. For some reason he doesn’t quite understand, all the faces seem familiar in some way or the other, as if he had personally known these people at some point in history.

But nothing clicks.

Their faces suggest that they might be shouting, shrieking, urging him on. But all is mute. All Amir can hear is the sound of his own breath, the motion of his own muscles, his feet thumping on the ground again and again, the sound too, in super slow motion.

People keep passing by, faces appearing and disappearing in the space of a moment. But the finishing line is nowhere in sight, and the jog continues. Slowly, Amir gets so used to the rhythm of it all – his breath, the movement of his limbs, those familiar but unknown faces – that he doesn’t feel anything anymore. His mind has almost gone numb.

And then he sees his mother in the crowd, standing serenely, looking at him with eyes that tell just one emotion. He sees his father too, and his grandparents, his uncles and aunts, the maid at his village home, the kindergarten ‘best friend’ he had almost forgotten the name of, the first girl he ‘fell in love’ with back in Class 2, his junior school class teacher, the bully who pushed him repeatedly against the wall every morning at school, the person at Mother Dairy from whom he used to take the milk every evening, his father’s friend whose sight he couldn’t stand as a child – everyone! Everyone!

Amir watches perplexed, trying to call out to these people, but no words come out. He tries desperately to say something to them, a Hello maybe, but it’s as if his vocal chords have disappeared. He finally gives up, and instead, waves at them as they wave at him, smiling at them as they smile at him.

It feels as if it would never end, new faces replacing old ones, more and more of them coming from the recent past.

And then, he wakes up. It’s a dream.

He smiles to himself, and gets up from the bed, feeling oddly enlightened.

Yummy

Ladies and gentleman, welcome to Khana Khazana! I’m your host Bery Vored and today I’ve got something really special for you people. It’s called the LSA.

Ha ha, don’t be afraid! It’s not what you’re thinking, just a simple, clean, easy-to-make, easily-made dish, and one that’ll leave you wondering what it really tasted like!

Getting to the recipe, start with a Day Without Anything To Do. Boil it over a Morning Spent In Bed for a minimum of three hours, maximum - as much as you like, and leave it in the Hot Summer Sun for about half an hour.

Pretty easy, isn’t it? And you know what? Half the work is already done!

Now take the pan and put some Indigestible Paranthas to it. If the mixture burns and lets out violent, pungent fumes, you know you’re on track! Take the above and if you so wish, put a pinch of Movies Played And Stopped In Between. To add further spice to your very own LSA, you can even add a little of Newspapers Flipped Through And Closed.

You’re now almost done. To add colour to the thing, you can add two teaspoons of Cigarettes Smoked To The Filter. This is sure to give the mixture a tinge of bright, effusive yellow. If you’re the dreamy type, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to add a handful of Absurd Plans For The Evening as well. Just for fun, I mean.

Last but not the least, be sure to put in some Tongues Clicked And Sighs Sighed. This is perhaps the most crucial part of the recipe, giving all the previous actions meaning and form. In a way, summing them up!

All this done, go ahead and have a bite at the yellow, placid looking solid in front of you. What you have got, ladies and gentlemen, is your very own Lazy Summer Afternoon!

I hope you liked what I had on offer today. Your host Bery Vored promises to be back at the same place, same time next week. Till then, its goodbye!

Madman

The madman sits beneath a tree, from morning nine to evening five. The tree provides him relief from the sun overhead during the day, perhaps the only comfort he has decided to bestow upon himself.

He is always dressed in a grey full-sleeve shirt and white trousers, colours of both being judge-able only through close examination. He looks young, hair all black, skin unwrinkled, almost like a boy in his teens. His skin is jet-black, so much so that no one can tell where the forehead ends and the hair on the head starts. His eyes are small and weird, as if he was suffering from permanent eye-flu. The pupil isn’t even visible; all one can see is a small, dirty white in a forest of black.

He sits cross-legged, carrying a string of beads in his right hand, which he keeps turning incessantly. His left hand is free, resting on his thigh. He doesn’t sit still under the tree; he shakes, twists and turns, jolting all parts of his body vigorously, like a man delirious with fever. He mutters things under his breath, loud enough so that you can hear the sound, low enough that you cannot make them out.

In between this act of pure, crystalline madness, he stops. Suddenly. As if he was in a game and someone had just said FREEZE. He then gets to his feet, moves a little away from the tree, looks up at the skies, smiles – first to himself and then to the intrigued strangers around him, and gets back to work.

He is a madman. His work is madness.

Dark Man III

‘Dada, come here…’, Amir heard his younger brother Ari shout to him.

‘What is it?’, replied Amir, sitting under the mango tree, reading a book.

‘Come na!’, Ari shrieked again. This time, Amir could detect a tremor in his voice, a tension. He walked over to where Ari was.

Ari was standing in front of a neighbouring house, leaning with both hands rested on the wooden door. He was as tall as a six year old boy is and could see the scene unfolding in the backyard behind the door only between the planks of wood.

In the backyard, there was a dark man squatting on the ground. He was clad only in a white dhoti, everything else about him being black. In his left hand was a chicken, fluttering desperately. In his right was a long knife. The man was trying to control the chicken with his one hand, but the chicken seemed to be in no mood to give it all up so easily.

Ari watched the chicken. Amir watched Ari.

The dark man, finally fed up trying to stifle the chicken, pressed all its feet with his right leg, and in one quick action of his knife, separated the creature’s head from its body. The head flew in the air and fell a couple of feet away. The dark man recoiled sharply from the spectacle, as if in deep disgust.

Ari watched the chicken head. Amir watched Ari.

The rest of the chicken’s body still fluttered for a few moments, Ari constantly staring at it, waiting for it to finally stop.

It eventually did. Amir tried to pull his brother away from the scene, but Ari wouldn’t budge. Amir finally decided to leave, unsure of what had disturbed him more – the incident or the look in Ari’s eyes.

The above is a shot-to-shot description of a scene from the movie Pratidwandi by Satyajit Ray. Liberty has only been taken with the names of the characters.

Morning Blues

It’s Sunday morning. 11 A.M. Amir gets up, all groggy.

He totters to the door, in search of the newspaper, the only possible excuse he can think of to leave the bed. But it’s the 27th day of January, and as if the world had stopped functioning at all the previous day, there is no news to be found at the bottom of the door.

He unlatches the thing, but there is no milk packet left outside either. Seemingly, the cows and the doodhwala too had ceased to function in deference to our secular, sovereign republic. There won’t be any newspaper or tea today, thinks Amir, and feels like falling on to the bed again.

He switches on the TV, but its morning time, and they have nothing to show but old, stale news of yesterday, old, stale repeat telecast of yesterday’s game show, and the old, stale highlights of yesterday’s match, where India lost by more runs than they actually scored.

Cigarettes!, thinks Amir. There has to be a cigarette somewhere. He jumps for his jeans, but is heartbroken to find no packet there. He remembers distinctly that there was a packet, and there were at least a couple of cigarettes remaining. He runs to the living room, looking on top of the desk, on the sofa, on the divan, on the TV. But there is nothing. He goes back to his bedroom, searches all over again, keen, desperate eyes dying to be sated. But there is nothing.

What a torrid start to the day, thinks Amir, and lies down on the bed again, looking at the ceiling. No tea, no newspaper, no TV, no cigarettes – nothing at all.

Then, in a sudden surge of inspiration, he gets up, runs to his jacket lying on the chair alongside his bed. After all, that’s where he had left the cigarettes last night. He pats on the under pocket, and is overjoyed to find the thing after his heart, relieved to find his saviour.

There is just one cigarette left, but one should be enough for now.

He slides open the matchbox.

There is just one match left, but one should be enough for now.

He strikes fire with that solitary promise of relief, and brings it closer to the cigarette held in his mouth.

The promise burns with promise at first, then starts to die out slowly. Like a dying man - half hopeful, half believing - desperately trying to hold on to life, Amir hurries the thing to the tip of his cigarette. But only a part of the tip catches fire. He sucks frantically at the other end, still hopeful, still believing. But the all-too-obvious happens.

The foul taste of half-burned tobacco in his mouth is the icing on the cake.

It’s Sunday morning. 11:20 A.M. Amir goes to bed, all fed up.

Sums & Differences

‘Sum me up’, she said, excited and afraid at the same time.

Amir looked at her, as if for the first time, trying to find meaning in her face, her hands, her hair.

And then he spoke.

‘You see it’s impossible for me to do that. Everything that I would say about you can never be more than half of what I really mean. And if I really think about it, it’s not for me to say what you really are, because what I think I know about you might just be 0.0000000000000001 % of what you actually are. Of what you actually are.’

Silence. 11 seconds. Of the uneasy type.

‘So I might as well say nothing. Nothing – that’s 0.0000000000000000 %. You see it doesn’t matter if you have 1 or 0 at the end, if you have 20 0’s preceding it. After the decimal point, I mean. I hope you see that.’

Silence. 9 seconds. Of the uneasy type.

‘Do you?’

She didn’t.

She didn’t answer. Nevertheless, Amir had successfully negotiated the challenge.

The Temple

Overnight Rain. Mud. Temple. Outside. Corner. Amir. Standing.

Question: Why is Amir standing in front of the temple?
Options:

A) Amir loves standing in the mud.

B) Amir regards this as the garden spot of the city. He is just drinking in the view.

C) Amir is a sleepwalker. He doesn’t know. He is just sleeping. He is just walking.

D) Amir is bored.

Correct Answer: D

Amir is bored. Why? Because there is nothing to do. Nothing to do! He is waiting for the aarti to begin. And finish. There is quite some time left before it did, and his parents, intensely devout that they are, are determined not to leave the temple without having witnessed it.

So, escaping the repeated insistence of his father to sit with them inside, he came out for a walk.

Question: Then why is he standing?
Answer: He soon found that the stroll wasn’t quite a good idea – the monsoons were on, the road was muddy, with puddles aplenty. So finally, without any options left to consider, he decided to stand at a corner and look.

But look at what?

Question: Describe the scene in front of Amir.
Answer: The place outside the temple is crowded. It is evening; time for the aarti, and therefore people are flocking in, smelling of their undiminishing, unshakeable faith in religion. There is the smell of incense too, coming from the shops on his right and left, selling just about everything you might associate with worship – coconuts (for prasad), cloth (for the Gods to wear), specially perfumed agarbattis to simply take away, etc etc etc.

And yes, they are also selling what might be called religious memorabilia – small artefacts, paintings of Krishna and Radha, even watches with Krishna playing his beloved flute on the dial - which devoted followers can buy to remind themselves of their devotion, and foreigners can take away to show off to their folk back home.

“Hey Barney, what do you have there?!”

“Oh I got that from Indyeah. It’s a Krishnay-Radder painting, one of the Hindu gods, quite a character. And that’s his wife… no no… mistress… na… girlfriend… well, something of that sort.”

“Fuckin’ Beautiful Man!”

“Yeah. Exotic! Heh heh.”

There are many foreigners to be seen here, not in the clothes Amir would associate with them, but in saffron, with brown beads worn in a mala, dressed just like sadhus, the sort he’d seen in the movie Hare Rama Hare Krishna – long blonde hair, one chilam in the mouth, one in hand, doped to the bone, singing bhajans as if they really meant it.

Harry-Om-Harry! Harry-Om-Harry!

Face white white. Clothes saffron. So that if you gave them a green turban, they would look like the tiranga ulta. The tri-colour inverted. Ha ha!

There are some which are in their usual attire – tourists – looking like something out of a Woodland advertisement. Bottle green jackets, khakis, brown mountaineer shoes. There are a couple standing in front of the shops, enraptured by the sight of an infant eating bread crumbs, picking them up from the ground itself.

“Rick, look at that!”

“Yeah…got it”, says Rick, clicking on his state-of-the-art camera (Canon EOS1. 10 megapixels. 10X Zoom. Wow.), with a triumphant look on his face, glad to have his Indyeah! - and her blood-sister Poverty - on film.

The crowds slowly thicken. Twenty minutes pass. Amir can hear the bells ringing from the temple. The aarti has begun. He heads back.

Question: How does Amir feel?
Options:

A) Amir is relieved. The wait is over.

B) Amir is angry with himself; he missed the start of the aarti!

C) Amir is sad. It was fascinating looking at the crowd around him.

D) We can’t say. We don’t know. Amir is a sleepwalker.