Anindita Sengupta

The National Gallery of Modern Art (or Manikyavelu Mansion as I think of it) is one of my favourite places in the city for some obvious reasons — art, trees, a building made for stories. I was there again about a week ago, noticing the way things are framed: the building by trees, the sculptures on the lawn by the gigantic fountain, the fountain by the even more gigantic tree behind it. Perhaps the eye naturally travels to this because one is in an art gallery and predisposed to seeing in a certain way.

I stared at the sweeping woman in front of the fountain for longer than deemed polite. It just seemed miraculous somehow, this tiny figure caring for all this, tiny and orange in the foreground. A little orange miracle.

In the lobby, the watchman’s chair was empty. I don’t know where he was but the emptiness of the chair in that long corridor, framed by the opening and the tree, made me think about him more than if he had actually been present.

The place is full of gigantic trees and because the mansion is only two storeys high, they tend to be easily visible. Two large rooms on both floors of the mansion hold the contemporary art collection. There are tall windows in the corners outside which the trees lean and sway, a natural sweep up to the sky. Upstairs, smaller rooms house works by the Tagores, Nandalal Bose, Ram Kinkar Baij, Amrita Shergill and Jamini Roy,  These rooms are flanked by generous verandahs and the views are lavish. See the plum tree’s post on the trees at Manikyavelu Mansion. I came across her post when I googled the Mansion in hopes of finding something on its history. (I didn’t find anything so helpful links are most welcome.) Her pictures bring home the fact that trees really are the central attraction in this place of art.

This reminds me of a bit in WG Sebald’s Austerlitz where he talks about the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, about how its design and hugeness intimidates and frustrates the visitor. There, according to Sebald, the largeness of the towers make one uneasy, even frightened. At Manikyavelu Mansion, we have to deal with largeness but of a different kind, that of nature.  And it is interesting that for the most part, largeness in nature — the sea, mountains, tall trees — tend to be relaxing rather than threatening.

I took pictures of the mansion in colour and changed some of them to greyscale on the computer. It’s interesting to see how it immediately looks more somber. All shadows and reflections. It also looks older. Is that because one associates black & white with old pictures? Or is it because some of the things that contrive to make it look less old, like new paint, are not as obvious?

To the side of this structure, there is a small cafe which reminded me of a school canteen — very functional, no frills. Tea, coffee, some soft drinks, packets of biscuits and chips. In large supermarkets, I tend to feel dazed and bewildered, even annoyed, by the surfeit of choices. The limited choices here made me feel simple, content. As if the act of choosing something to eat or drink had been restored to its natural proportions.

I sat there and drank a Mirinda and watched the building, its giant driveway and its verandahs, and wondered about the noise and life it must have contained once when some large family lived in it.

Unlike some art galleries, this one is very quiet especially on a weekday afternoon.

And there was a red door with a Banyan tree in the foreground which I photographed because it seemed mysterious, a little like something I had imagined, something from a childhood story that would lead god knows where.  Probably only to the inner workings of the place. Still, it was red. It was behind a tree. There are things to be said for that.

I thought this was going to be another ‘linking’ post but it turned into something else. Which is reassuring because it means I’m becoming less lazy as it gets warmer. I’m on the last leg of my stay in Canterbury and feeling a bit reflective. It’s been particularly interesting because it’s my first time living alone. (I moved out of home only when I got married which in any case was relatively early.) There’s a strange and sometimes disquieting freedom to being able to set the rhythms of your own day. In this case, it’s heightened because I have no job, no classes, nobody to answer to. Sometimes the space is overwhelming. Other times, it’s magical.

I spend a lot of time reading or writing in my room. It’s quieter than any place I’ve lived in before. Except on some nights when one of my flatmates decides she must make some noise. On these nights, she sings very loudly, has screaming matches with some unfortunate person on the phone or laughter fests with friends at the doorway. She’s 19 as are my other three flatmates. Apparently, there were some issues with availability of rooms so I ended up in the under-grad area. It’s possible to live very separate lives though, which is a good thing because they’re quite shy around me and (understandably) treat me as if I’m from another planet, to be stepped around gingerly and so on. I remember how I felt about people over 30 when I was 19. So it’s interesting in the ironic ‘your time will come’ kinda way to be on the other side of the fence.

Occasionally, I walk to the centre of campus about 15 minutes away to go to the library or buy something. There’s been the odd social thing and I’ve met some interesting post-grad students. Sometimes I go into Canterbury town and have lunch and walk around. The riverside walk is quite idyllic. There are gardens and little bridges, lost umbrellas, lots of ducks and then suddenly, swans.

I’ve been going to London very often, at least once a week and because I have dear people who invite me over, I’ve spent some weekends there.  There’s little one can add to the reams that have been written and said about London but I do love it. A big city has a different sort of energy about it and I haven’t experienced that since I left Bombay where I grew up. So my liking for London is partly nostalgia. But only partly. The rest is just the fantastic coolth of the city.

I also find it exhausting though. I’m always dreadfully tired by the end of the day. Okay, there is a four-hour commute. But it’s more than that, something to do with the high that comes from collective energy and the subsequent anticlimax, perhaps. This is what makes such cities so addictive, I suppose. Each day packs in more of life’s mania, darkness and exuberance, the gambler’s roller-coaster of emotions. Other places can seem desperately ordinary in comparison.

But it’s a huge sign of progress — or age — that I haven’t started mourning the loss of Bombay as a result or wishing I lived in London. I’m sort of seeing the possibilities contained in living the quieter, more ordinary life and it seems like, finally, I’ve grown to like my life in Bangalore enough to not want to change it. It’s taken a long time for it to feel like home. A little more than a decade. And it’s been very hard at times so I feel a bit like celebrating.

Anyway, now for those links. This is one of the nicest International Women’s Day posts I read (and I’m not saying that just because I’m mentioned in it). Jessica Smith on female bloggers (via Rumpus). And this poem in Writers Connect which I found surprising.

And morning has broken and I must sleep.

Last Monday, I finally went to Whitstable which is only a few miles away. No excuses for not visiting earlier except that I was waiting for it to be less cold. I visited the beachfront first which is so very different from the ones back home. The sea looks serene and in the distance, there is a wind farm in the water, giant windmills that look like pinwheels. The ground is full of shells. People walk their well-behaved dogs.

The harbour is beautiful — fishing nets and rope, blue boats, mossy ramps leading down to the water, huge bags of whelk shells outside the whelk shops. Here’s a picture of whelks being steamed to take off their shells easily. Winter is not the best time to be there because many places are closed during the week. And I had gone on a Monday, which is the day the famous Crab and Winkle is closed. I did go and stare at the offerings in the fish market though. It was a moment of longing. It must have been my Bengali blood singing. Or something like that.

I’m fascinated by fishing nets for some reason. And there were plenty of those around. I won’t inflict all the photos on you but here’s one. Aren’t they pretty?

Some more photos from around the harbour.

Weak with hunger at 5.30 pm after not having eaten all day (having been lost in photographs and seagulls and so on), I wandered into a Mr Fish and Chips. The man behind the counter was from apna Punjab.

It was a bit of a shocker, frankly, especially when he asked me to speak to him in Hindi, why don’t you? I ate my cod and chips while listening to sikh kirtans in the background. It was an odd coincidence because the last time I went traveling in India, it was to Amritsar and the music instantly transported me to the Golden Temple. I had not expected to be reminded of the Golden Temple while eating fish and chips in a seaside town in England.  Anyway next time, I’ll have a more authentic experience eating oysters.

There was an element of theatre in Ruth Padel’s reading of her poems. Not only did she bring alive the narrative charge of her poems but she also did different voices for the characters in her poems, usually Darwin or his wife since she was mostly reading from Darwin: A Life in Poems. The book is an unusual and ambitious project but the poems she read were not groaning under the weight of the lofty idea. They were tender, humourous, down-to-earth, and they made Darwin more human which is not easy to do with legends. Some are available here.

Disappointingly (but expectedly), the Q&A session after the reading had few questions on poetry. Darwin, spirituality and conservation vied for attention, and obviously more people are interested in these than in poetry. I think there were one or two interesting questions about whether she would ever turn (return) from science towards poetry. The unsaid words here were ‘real’, ‘normal’, something like that. I may be paraphrasing this badly but I think the attempt was to understand whether she would move away from the specific themes she’s been attached to so far, whether she would ‘free’ her poetry to go where it will.

So is themed poetry restricted in some way? Is poetry directed towards a cause glancing away from other areas of truth it could discover? On the other hand, judges on award panels seem to think that big concerns are important for poetry. Re: Judge’s comments on Philip Gross winning the TS Eliot Prize for The Water Table and Roddy Lumsden’s comments on that.

Does anyone else have a problem with this preference for themed books as opposed to miscellanies. Surely that’s an American thing, arc and concept and all? I’m happy with either, but claiming it as a strength which goes towards a prize win is odd, no?

Ditto with ‘big concerns’ – are we giving prizes for ‘big concerns’ now? Big concerns, whatever they are, are great, but surely not a reason to award a prize?

So which side of the fence are you on?

Back to Padel: some of us got to meet her the next day for an informal discussion and lunch,  a generous three hours during which the questions were more focused. We talked about some nitty-gritty stuff like craft and performance but it didn’t graduate to a very evolved discussion on poetics. I’m not sure why. The time was probably short and the group a bit diverse (playwrights, fiction-writers, poets). She clearly believes in modernist ideas of compression, avoiding abstractions and so on. I would’ve been interested to know how she responds to poetry written in a very different aesthetic. Or what she feels about Language poetry, which is more recent.

Anyway, relatedly, I’ve started my three months of poetry-and-not-much-else at the University of Kent. The room is all tidy lines, the air outside is crisp and cold, my fingers have not frozen yet. The snow has stopped but there are some meager patches of it lying around. The quiet is so big I could float in it.

I’m thrilled to have access to books we normally don’t get in India. The high point of my day was reading Don Paterson’s Nil Nil at an English pub outside the cathedral. The picture of the cathedral is a bit blurry because my hands had gone numb in the cold.

Revisit notions of beauty and ugliness–all notions, actually–plus get my head out of the sand and not plunge it back there again. This is the closest I’m going to come to a new year resolution. Of sorts (, out of sorts). Last year, it was consistency and balance and I’m happy to reminisce that I’ve almost been successful. When I’ve eaten, drunk or slept too much (or too little), slept and woken at odd hours, been workaholic or too-lazy, been extreme in other words, at least I’ve pursued one end consistently for many days. And then the opposite for an equal number of days. Which balances it out in the end, I suppose.

So there it is for 2010: revisiting and clear-eyedness. This ostrich, which is ugly or beautiful depending on how you look at it and does not have its head buried in the sand, is a mascot.

Oh, and I hope y’all noticed how I’ve done some dusting and cleaning around here with categories and links. This look, I think, will stay for a while. I’ve been playing around with it too much and there’s no reason to give up on consistency just because the year’s over.

Happy 2010!

This is at one remove–a substitute
For final answers. But the wise man knows
To cleave to the one living absolute
Beyond paraphrase, and shun a shrewd repose.

~ Derek Mahon, Preface to a Love Poem

Impossible to look directly into
another’s eyes. Impossible to look
into your own. You read the dense book
of being like a document you flick through.

~ George Szirtes, Rough Guide

The entry is the usual narrow lane crammed with shops selling kadas, rudraksha necklaces, brass artifacts, flowers, garlands, sweets. Jumbles of colour. Women haggling over fake gold rings. Boys clanging dekchi lids. Frothy lassi being poured into glasses. The lane opens out suddenly into a temple compound, a clear white space. Neat counters where you can keep shoes or get prasad. An automatically replenishing puddle for people to wash their feet. And a small shrine of Durga. Through a gate is the main temple. It’s built in the middle of a lake.

And it’s very gold-infused.

On a weekday morning, it’s relatively quiet. A few boys clang the bells with more enthusiasm than devotion warrants and a Bengali family stands around, commenting on…well, everything. I find it amazing how Bengali travelers are everywhere, jabbering on in Bangla, confident that nobody understands and therefore indulging in happy, private conversations, mostly about food.

The idols in the inner sanctum glitter fiercely gold. I find it hard to muster up devotion for gods who look like wealthy businessmen kids dressed up for their own wedding. In front of them, two children — a boy and a girl — sit on makeshift thrones, dressed up as gods. They look like they have to sit there all morning, possibly all day, squirming in their prickly, fake-gold crowns, their flaming orange outfits. Bengali woman says to daughter who looks about eight: See Radha-Krisha! Do you want to be? Radha-Krishna? Daughter looks utterly bemused.

I walk around the temple, looking at the beautiful doors and some very interesting statues enclosed in glass which depict scenes from the Ramayana.

At the back, I find Shiva. He’s spouting water from his head and this, I now realise, is what is supposedly creating the lake. The Ganges in miniature. A friendly priest says I must have the holy water. He looks pained that I can even consider not doing so. I frown and think of dead fish and human spit. I like Shiva. I really do. He’s the coolest in the pantheon. But I’m sure he’ll forgive me my fussy drinking habits.

Outside, the temple guard looks disturbed when I’m about to leave. It turns out I haven’t seen the other temple, the Durga temple. This must be what the place gets its name from. He points me down a narrow lane, looking pleased at having done his good deed for the day. The lane smells vaguely of cow dung and construction debris but is relatively clean. This temple is simpler, nicer somehow. There’s something stark about the trishul as an object of worship.

There is a gigantic tree in the courtyard, encircled with yards and yards of red and yellow string, years of prayer wound around it like a noose. At the back, there are two large walls covered with story panels on Hanuman’s life. Quite a labour of love.

On my way back through the lane, I pass a large room which seems bare and purposeless, almost a place for the priests to generally hang out. In one of the alcoves, a girl sits studying the scriptures. She looks very peaceful. And perhaps,
she is.

July’s been terribly hectic, in terms of actual activity as well as inner shifts, and the blogging always suffers at such times. First there was the very rushed, very rainy trip to Goa. For once (oh irony!), I actually managed to fall asleep on the train, only to be woken up at 8 am and told that the train was not going any further. We were in Hubli. Landslides had blocked our way into Goa.

What struck me is this — there was no announcement on a PA system, no officials busily informing passengers what to do. Everything worked on word-of-mouth, each passenger telling the others, the news traveling from one end of the train to the other like a wave. I scrambled out of the bunk, followed the long file of groggy, excited passengers onto a rattle-trap bus. The journey was fun. The roads were beautiful and intermittent rain pearled the gigantic windshield. There was music on my iPod. There was Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions when I bored of the landscape, which was seldom. There were excitable boys playing Dumb Charades with wild gesticulations. The woman next to me peeled bananas and chatted about her home in Margao, her IT-professional son in Bangalore, and her husband who refuses to go anywhere anymore. The TC accidentally dropped his clipboard on me and just missed goring one eye. For the rest of the trip, he gave me sheepish grins which I returned with the ‘I’m such a good person that I forgive you’ look. Such drama! If the journey had lasted much longer, it would have become a love affair.

***

The string of buses stopped for brunch (dosa and sheera) at a wayside place just before Karwar. One of the passengers — a woman traveling alone — went to the loo and her bus left without her. She had not told anyone where she was going or that they should wait. She had not registered her presence in some manner — and it’s easy to be invisible when you’re alone. Anyway, she did the sensible thing of getting onto our bus. She seemed poor and elderly though she might have been middle-aged with the prematurely haggard look that hardship brings. She was frantic about her things left behind on the other bus. For the next four hours or so, she begged the TC to find out, cried intermittently, even struck her chest in worry and fear. I wonder what her bag contained. What possessions, what valuables, what earthly things. All her money for the journey? Jewels she had carried to some wedding? All the clothes she owns?

Our TC called a few of the others but he clearly did not know all the numbers. Finally he told her she would have to travel to Vasco where all the buses would terminate, and then hunt for her bag. She asked if the buses would be traveling back to Margao where she wanted to get off. He said no. She looked stricken, realizing she would have to spend the extra money to get back on her own. For her, it was not a good journey.

***

I got off at Margao, took a cab to my hotel and got there at 4 pm, only two hours later than anticipated. The next two days were spent in sinful indolence and soul-baring talk (I was meeting my closest friend after years). Goa itself was beautiful — wetly green and fecund, bleak and stormy all at the same time. Palolem beach had one and a half shacks open and a straggle of kids playing football.

In one of the shacks, the deadpan manager turned out to be a lech, full of roving eyes and roving questions. I was short with him. My friend astutely pointed out that our food would now be laced with spit. We retreated to the other shack where the waiters were more discrete. We drank cocktails and ate king fish. All the beach dogs were inside to shelter from the rain. They nestled near our legs or sat at the edges of the shack like sentries, or dosed in small pits they had dug for themselves. The plastic sheets covering the shack flapped in the wind. The sand between our toes was dark and gritty. We talked about college and life, the last ten years and now. We watched the sea roil and seethe.

I took a flight back to Bangalore because all trains on the southwestern route had been canceled. More landslides. So I didn’t have time to finish the second book I had taken along, Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. Oh, but instead, I used the extra time to lounge around the hotel. I saw a huge chess board with its horses dripping rain water. And I drank beer in a pool while it was pouring, my tiny spot covered by a gazebo while all along the rest of it, sharp needles of water rose upwards like steam. I’m not complaining.

“We shall disallow travel and the mingling of songs”—this line from Jeet Thayil’s poem ‘Rules for Citizens’ makes me think about the Gay Pride Parade. Because travel is of so many kinds, much of it disallowed. At this year’s Bangalore Pride on Sunday, there was much mingling of songs as well.

Travel. There was a boy I’ve met a few times. He always struck me as attractive but on Sunday, he was wearing shimmery pants, an open jacket, long hair. His eyes were lined. His skin was cinnamon. He looked beautiful. Sexy and scared and triumphant all at once. What is the distance, I wonder, between that person and the person he is forced to be most of the time? For him, how far was the journey from home to Town Hall, really?

Mingling of songs. At the centre of the march, there were flags, drums, raucous songs. All kinds of identity bits spiralled around it: hijra, kothi, double decker, bisexual, lesbian, queer, straight. The frail, the firm, the defiant, the inured to injury.

Gay pride is really about the freedom to be — and love — who one chooses. Sexuality (and love), like gender, is a continuum. Where we fall on this continuum like feathers on a clothesline, nobody can know. How strange and sad it is  that there are those who insist on legislating, moralizing, straitjacketing and politicking around it.

Even stranger that some do not believe that this is an important freedom. In a world where the pursuit of money is slavish, where we’ve beaten the environment to death with our appetites for material things, what can be more important than privileging, for once, other things like identity and love?  It’s what (barely) saves us.

And it was fantastic to see evidence of this on the streets. The parade was noisy, large, full-of-itself, serious and fun all at the same time. Just as it should be. How wonderful it would be, how colourful and joyous, if such freedom existed every day. The city could span its different stories, instead of relegating them to niches and corners, muffled and trussed. It could become all of them.

*Cross-posted at Ultra Violet

Sankey Tank is rather pretty if one can forget about the crowds and look at other things.