An Indian Winter and an Ancient City

An Indian winter to me, has always been an idea too bizarre to contemplate.  So completely removed was it from my world of experience, fable-like in the world of Chennai summers and Kerala monsoons. The only winters I have known are completely wrong-timed, unpredictable Australian winters, the surreal, fascinating ones from books and beautiful, white ones of Hollywood movies. So when I landed in Delhi last week for a very short visit, I was stepping into a world I had not even ventured to envisage. And I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it either, because my experience with winters have been far from pleasant and I by nature find it hard to be happy unless I have the sun beaming down at me.  But I had, for a moment, forgotten that India is a magic land of surprises that never ceases to amaze, a Pandora’s Box of commonplace miracles that will turn the strongest cynic into a believer. And my first experience of Delhi winter certainly did not disappoint.

Winter is languid in Delhi, settled languidly like the morning fog, on life that did not fight or drive it away. Here  I saw none of the blazer protected and boot strengthened rush from an air conditioned room to another that I had known in Australia; the presumptuous, unrelenting crusade to defeat weather and to ignore its ancient claim. In Delhi, life seemed stir to the pulse of winter, slowing down to its rhythm and moving to its directions. And the people, certainly not cut out for the cold, simply took it in their stride and tried to make the best they can of it with, of course with the Indian twist. So my memories of Delhi winter are of auto drivers in glittery sweaters of all shades, aunties out in the streets at 8*C in cotton sarees, chowkidars huddled around bonfires every 10 metres on streets and many such quaint sights.

Winter in Australia had been lonely. Walking down streets among bundled up figures, too focused on their destinations and too determined not be bothered by the cold to even pause to remark on the hardness of it all, had left me feeling quite forlorn and cold. Quite like the tiny fish in a huge shoal that did not know how to swim. In Delhi, winter was cold, but there was a certain sense of commonness about the experience and an equanimity that breathed some warmth to the heart. My most memorable experience in Delhi is a walk I took with my friends. It was late evening and very cold. We were returning after dinner and couldn’t find an auto and had no choice but to walk down the long street to the main road. I was almost shivering in minutes and was sure that I will not make it till the end of the street when my friend pointed out bonfires along the length of the street where people were huddled. As we walked, we stopped at the bonfires and warmed ourselves in the space the people seated around it, who otherwise paid no attention to our presence, made for us. It was a wonderfully uplifting feeling just standing there, feeling blessed.

Of course three days are too short a time to get to know a place and this could well be musings of an over imaginative mind. You can’t read a city in such a short while but like that odd stranger whose soul you saw when you casually glanced into his eyes, some places can give you a whiff of its ancient secrets in moments. For me, my encounter with the capital city was something like that.  In Delhi, history is a living breathing entity, a person who walks with you as you visit bazaars and malls on the metro and  on rickshaws, through a kaleidoscope of time.  I simply couldn’t escape its long spidery fingers there. I constantly felt like the ghosts of old Mughal rulers rode with me as I travelled on roads where Mercs and Nanos battled, past ancient ruins half hidden by sky scrapers, past ‘lost’ monuments being discovered for the Commonwealth Games, political headquarters and ghettos, faces, voices, smells and flavours, all under the languid grace of a very Indian winter.

Like all journeys, mine too ended back home, in Chennai. Here as I comfortably settled back to my morning filter coffee and the soothing blarings of suprabadham from the neighboring temple, I let my musings about places and history wander to Chennai. I have often joined friends in complaining about the lack of historic places in Chennai, gone on Chennai -Discovery journeys that began and ended in the Marina beach. Though no place in the world can ever make me grow disillusioned with Chennai (because after all, Chennai is home), after returning home from Delhi, I began to ponder over where her history hid and what her voice sounded like. That was when I began to realise that in Chennai, history did not have a separate identity. It is an indistinguishable a part of the amalgam of present, completely blended into the rhythm of everyday life. In Mylapore agraharams slokas are still recited, in the Central Station life is chaotically alive, in the Sathome church Sundays are social, at the Schmidt Memorial at Eliot’s beach children play hide and seek, the Armenian church is hidden behind road side stalls, the walls of Fort St.George are buried beneath the humdrum of activity and in the Marina politics and love share space. None of these are historic sites or mere tourist spots but sturdy landmarks in the landscape of the life of the city. In Delhi history was the ghost of a Mughal ruler who walked with me; here history is the man I meet on the road.

Like I said, India is a Pandora’s Box of commonplace miracles. A life time isn't enough to experience all its surprises. And though I have never been a cynic, every time I see more of it, I become a stauncher believer.

A Midsummer Noon's Dream

(This is again one of the poems I wrote sometime back, again part of the Cubicle Poems collection. This is about a bizarre world, one where the compartments of fantasy are broken down and there is utter beautiful anarchy.)


The wood is dipped in yellow
This lazy afternoon.
Imps chase each other
Around the old banyan tree
While a witch doctor naps,
Overhead on a creeper hammock.
The gandharvas are out on a stroll
bright, radiant and tall.
Flowers shy away
behind leaves as they pass.


A poor Pootham sleeps
flopped under an Asoka tree,
exhausted from his search for Unni.
The little fairies, bright and gay
Pull at his hair and beard.
There, up on the guava tree,
monkeys slowly gather
and mothers point to their babies
the monkey God, Hanuman,
Lying under the tree, majestic
His eyes closed, a smile on his lips.


Elves play their harp to wide eyed hobbits
Brahmadaityas and poltergeists
Huddle in a corner whispering,
Planning their next mischief.
A cauldron lies empty on the grass
As a pair of witches nap near it.
Far above, on the tallest mango tree
Kuttichatan lazily lounges
as flower fairies tell him their tales.


The trees in an afternoon stupor,
Close their wise eyes to the madness of the woods.
The sunlight lazily filters in through the leaves.
Safe from all the sweet chaos,
beneath a yam leaf,
On a couple of toadstools,
You and I sip our
afternoon glasses of sunshine.

A new home and a few random thoughts...

Shifting homes can be a tiresome exercise. I recently moved to our new flat and was almost broken in the process.  As is common knowledge, confusion, volatile tempers and unrelenting physical strain are all part of this moving game. But after more than twelve straight hours of packing and unpacking, with every muscle in my body crying out in pain, my head spinning and my voice hoarse, what I had not anticipated was the emotional exhaustion that it brought about. I was feeling raw and red within, exhausted beyond tears and laughter. I couldn't understand this emotional weariness as I wasn’t particularly upset about leaving behind our old flat, which I had always considered a sort of a way-stop rather than a permanent home, and I was certainly excited about the new home. Yet there I was sitting on the floor at 1 in the morning, all my stuff laid out around me unable to move a muscle not because of physical fatigue but because mind, that unfettered bird had taken refuge on a far off, lone post, exhausted beyond endurance, and was refusing to budge. As I think about it, I realise it was the exercise of moving lives that had drained me thus.

When you shift homes, you do not just shift your things but also lives, the memories, the laughter, the silences. That long day I had tried to scrape of our lives from the peeling paint of the old flat and paste them on to the smoothness of new walls. What of cracks and niches from where they refused to budge and simply wouldn’t stick? How much coaxing and cajoling it took to conjure up the spirits of our past, the spoken and unsaid words, the laughter and the spilled tears, the dreams, the pain and the fears to come away with us and reconcile with the vague, formless new ones into the promise of a new life!

And how difficult it was to find them, in the odd places that they hid! In an old dented rusted Quality Street Mackintosh candy tin with a pair of a child’s large pink shell specs, an old lead battery, a couple of ancient pencils and a dangerously rusted pencil sharpener hid the spirits of two little girls who once lived in wonder world of dreams, the warmth of a hand to hold and the lingering pain of long distance calls; in a portrait of Gandhi was the indelible laughter of friendship; a miniature stainless steel Prestige pressure cooker held an old man’s idiosyncrasies and his undying love for the family he left behind; a tattered old Hindi dictionary, all of a woman’s good intentions; a sewing machine that had not stitched a single straight stitch ever, hoarded a million crooked, broken ones that had somehow joined together to a topsy-turvy beautiful print of family.

And with every picture I took off the walls, every piece of cloth I put into boxes, I could feel the spirits of our life move around, sulk, shout and scream. Finally using all our energies conjuring up all that would come, we stepped into our new home. And here we let them free, out to move around settle into their corners and make this flat our home. Now exhausted completely, with the pieces of our life scattered around me, I rest. Somewhere in the background I can hear my mother’s voice grow shriller and somewhere beyond the numbness of fatigue I anticipate happiness, a new beginning to an old life.

The Stranger by my Doorway

This is one of the most recent poems I've written, part of a collection I've named Cubicle Poems.

Her dark skin glows in the light,

Her black eyes flash,

Her lips, ruby red.

She stands far, aloof,

So beautiful, so terribly complete,

The stranger by my doorway.

Once I knew her,

This stranger by my doorway.

She was the child who held my hand,

As we splashed across the paddy fields of my childhood.

With her I lived

A million adolescent fantasies.

It was her I ran to,

When later, the world turned cruel.

But now a woman,

The stranger by my doorway,

She frightens me.

She has moved far ahead,

On the path that we once walked together.

I can only see her in the distance,

A silhouette, against a doorway.

A menacing demoness who

Frightens sleep from my eyes.

A dear friend who would not smile at me,

A kind mother who holds me to her breast and weeps

A lover who burns my passion,

The stranger by my doorway.

As I sit at my table writing,

I watch her,

Out of the corner of my eye.

Her long hair loose, her eyes flashing,

Her feet impatient,

Her body blazing in a strange fire.

Does she wait for me?

Or finally severed from me, is she leaving?

I dare not look into those eyes.

She astounds me, yet,
This dream I dreamt as a bright eyed child
 and followed since, secretly, cautiously,
A corporeal form  that was born from it,
This menacing woman now,
The stranger by my doorway.

Could it have been so potent?

The dream that I dreamt ?

Farewell

From a glacier glorious you were born.

From the magnificent mountains began your journey.

You gurgled with laughter, dear River,

When you first sensed Earth’s contours beneath you.

You felt life and energy ripple through you,

And soon learnt to gather it into a current.

The sun’s rays warmed you everyday,

The rain faithfully fed you.

You raced bounding down the mountain, eager,

“Ah! Impetuous youth!” I have heard many remark.

You made your own path as you moved,

Often guided by invincible Nature.

Rocks, trees, obstacles many you met,

But you learnt fast to change your path,

Or conquer by force, hurdles on your way.

As you moved, you gathered marks of the journey,

Contamination many called it, some age.

The crystal clarity of your waters, with time,

Gained new hues, new depths.

Many lands you passed on your way,

Some you hurriedly left behind,

Some you wished never to part,

And some you pined to return to.

But you moved ahead, for you had learnt early,

That your journey was supreme.

It is greater then you, your existence.

It is destiny you had to seek.

So you flowed across time and space.

Sometimes joyous you gurgled past,

Or in rage lashed out at land,

In waterfalls entwined beauty and power,

Or tranquil, gently rippled by.

Each day, a new life you lived,

And to many, gave life.

I, dear River, had gurgled with you,

In the misty days of the mountains.

With you I have flowed since,

I, a little stream by you side.

Often we have parted but never were far,

Together, we flowed in our separate paths.

But now dear one, our paths diverge.

Yours lead to wider deeper plains,

Mine, to linger awhile on these gentle shores.

Yes, we must part for our paths rule us,

But where is parting in our world?

Where all is one and one all.

When the wind carries a million messages,

The rain, our thoughts and dreams,

Streams, a part of ourselves would deliver.

And yet, it pains to see you move away.

I fare you well dear friend.

May your path guide you well.

Know that no obstacle will prove too strong

While your heart guides your current

Remember that your path is yours to create,

in the wide plains of Mother Earth.

Good luck sister, until we meet again,

For meet we shall, once doubtless,

In the vast depths of the ocean.

(I wrote this for my sister when she left for Austarlia. Kochu, I miss you more than I feel anything in life. There's always disharmony in currents when you are not around. )

The Cracked Mirror

This is a poem I wrote sometime back, at a creative writing exercise. Unlike the other stuff I wrote during that course, this poem somehow is poignant to me, besides being one of the shortest poems I've ever written.

To the house’s attic I would climb

Creep in through cobwebs and dust

To the corner where it stood-

A cracked mirror, old and neglected.

Long hours of playtime I have spent

Gazing at myself in the mirror

Reflected in bits and multiples

Counting the dark spots on my face

That age had awarded the mirror

In each of its cracked bits I saw-

Myself, in a different eye

I lived in stories with heroes

from each bit of the cracked mirror-

One sad, one happy, one angry

Yet all was one, all me.

There first I learnt of humans;

how many hid in one.

There I grew up each day,

discovering a new face within me.

Ages have passed since then.

And time, clouded my memories,

like the blurred images in the mirror.

Yet many a night lying awake,

I can see vividly-the cracked mirror

and the many faces it once drew of me.

Were they all me? Or mere flaws of the mirror?

The frog croak

The sky appears ominous, dark with clouds... heaven peeps in through cracks in the heavy grey wall... the trees sway in the wind... the air pregnant with expectation... the world is waiting... In the distance, a frog's far off croak, a clumsy, lone, unpleasant croak... And then the tumbling cascade of rain... heaven descends to earth in that moment... The eternal music of the rain drops, the purging of the Earth's soul, the moist kiss of the breeze. These are the perceptions that a frog croak stir in me. For me a frog croak is always accompanied by memories of the monsoon and the laughter of childhood, the long hours of wait for the rain and the inexplicable joy when it finally begins. Its green and grey and an indescribable rainbow shaded memory.

My writing too is like a frog croak- a clumsy, lone, ugly attempt at creating something beautiful. I look at it the same way I perceive the frog croak. It too is delved deep in memories, in sense perceptions and transient emotions. It is about rain and clouds of a different kind. This blog is an attempt to give voice to that croak, a step to overcome the awareness of its coarseness, to stand on a hill on a moonlit night, croak away into the silence and hope and wait for rain...