May was full of rain. I left for Kolkata at the beginning of the month. There were a few hectic, hot days during which I spent time in dingy courtrooms with mangy lawyers (property matters),  walked around New Market in an obsessive way, sat in Flury’s, ate in various places on Park Street, ate rolls, ate phuchka, ate mishti doi. I also caught a nasty infectious bronchitis bug that was my familiar for the next two weeks while among other things, I walked on top of glaciers.

Sikkim. It was rainy. There’s nothing else I can say at the moment because it was so beautiful and so moving that I’m going to slip into cliche.  Let’s just say: Development has not yet strangled it. There are few people, lots of roses and orchids. The lakes are clear. No plastic bags. There are waterfalls everywhere.  The mountains are scary and humbling and reassuring, all at the same time.  Tiny towns nestle in between them. Gorges. Signs of landslides. Monasteries. Rhododendrons. Glaciers.

First, we were in Gangtok for two days. We couldn’t get to Nathula Pass — the big must-see place nearby — but Tsongo Lake was well worth the visit. Some loud tourists rode off on yaks to go see China but there were quiet spots. The woman at Mintokling Guest House (which is where we stayed, and epic #success) talked about how ‘seeing China’ was such a psychological thing. People like to say they’ve been to the border, she said. I was disaffected at Wagah so I was okay with not seeing Nathula. Or just being very serene in a fatalistic way. I’m not sure which. They offer you tea, a family member had told me. But don’t step across the border.

After that, we traveled to north Sikkim. Some pictures:

Some more pictures here. By the time I got back to Bangalore, it was raining here. It’s been a good month.

Ninasam’s annual shibeera (camp) brings together academics, activists, actors, dancers, directors, enthusiasts, journalists, performers, photographers, poets, readers, singers, smokers, writers and watchers for a week of cultural adda. This time, there were two plays by the Ninasam repertory group — Kuvempu’s Shudra Tapaswi and Shakespeare’s Othello. There was Carnatic music by TM Krishna (sublime!). There were lectures by Sundar Sarrukai, Rajni Bakshi, Shiv Vishwanathan and N. Manu Chakravarthy. There were poetry, fiction and play readings in Kannada, Marathi and English. There was other stuff but I don’t want to bore you with lists. What I’m saying is there was lots of gorgeousity.

I did a reading of my work. I was more nervous about this than I am about most readings. Firstly, it was the post-lunch session. Yes, bring on the sympathy. Secondly, there were many Bhasha writers/readers at this gathering. I was expecting questions about mother tongue, cultural roots, the whole continuum of belonging and unbelonging about which I feel tormented sometimes and terribly bored at other times.

It was wonderful. Yes, there were some expected questions. But there were also some unexpected ones, especially later, and some wonderful responses from people I respect a great deal. But most interesting was this encounter with a Kannada poet —-

Our first meeting was after dinner the night before my reading. We were standing outside the canteen, near the washbasins. It was cold and rainy. Water dripping into my ears, muddy feet, poetry talk.

‘People who write in English can’t be authentic because they don’t think in English,’ he said.

‘I think in English.’

‘Yes, but you can’t feel in English.’ He drawled out the feel, like feeel. He looked at me compassionately because I am handicapped in this way.

‘Erm, yeah, I need a smoke.’

It took me a day before I could pass him without wanting to make faces. (Reader, I did not actually make faces. It might have seemed immature.)

After my reading, he waylaid me on two separate occasions, told me what he found problematic about my work–and some of it was exactly what has been appreciated in other places. It’s always freeing, even if unsettling, to encounter totally different poetics. It forces you to pick and choose elements from different cultures, to continually think about what would work best for a particular poem instead of following the easy formulae of rules. For example, I’ve been thinking about the whole ‘show, don’t tell’ principle quite a bit and his aesthetic preferences for exploratory statements as opposed to ‘photography’ made me think about this some more.

With all the intense communicating and socialising and sharing, I started feeling breathless every once in a while.  There is a small tailoring workshop on the grounds, a room with some women on sewing machines, a bench outside and in front, a grove stretching out. I sometimes went and sat there, under the trees, to think or write.  I exchanged smiles with the women but somehow, felt reluctant to break the silent companionship in which we sat — them inside, me outside — working at something. It seemed important to let that place be just for ‘doing’, and not for talking.

Here are some lovely pictures of the festival by Prateek Mukund. Oh, and anyone can attend the annual shibeera. You just need to write to Ninasam around the time it happens.

*

After the intensity of Ninasam, there was the intensity of illness. I was sick for about three weeks. The upside is that antibiotics affect the poetry well, mostly because I get so drugged that I can’t see straight. This, I find, is an useful state for poetry. As are hangovers.

It makes me think of this interview with Iain McGilchrist, a writer and psychologist who has written a “a fascinating analysis of, and a clear warning about, our increasingly divided brains (Poetryfoundation.org).” From the interview:

The right hemisphere is not just better at understanding metaphor in the strictest sense, but at making unusual connections, and therefore at any non-literal use of language. I don’t think we need to get hung up on that: metonymy is also going to be a right-hemisphere function—indeed my thesis is that poetry is nothing if not a recruitment of the right hemisphere.

I’m interested in this because I feel like I get through life as two different people (left-person and right-person) — one who is obsessed with process, systems, lists and order and the other who shirks all of these alarmingly. The first fills in excel sheets with plans, routines, menus worked out for the entire month. The other refuses to even look at the excel sheet on certain days. It’s not hard to predict which would be better at poetry. The trick is getting the right one to come out at the right time. It’s not nice when I’m at a social event and find myself drifting blankly while someone speaks to me, or open my mouth to say something and realise I’m speaking strange.  And on that note, read what George Szirtes says on conversation.

Also interesting is what McGilchrist says about the logic, order and patterning required in poetry. Rhyme, rhythm, metre.

And I could not agree less that having a clear metrical pattern and rhyme scheme is limiting, or tends to suggest the left hemisphere’s attitude to language. They are the condition of all music and dance, the right hemisphere’s domain, and when we decide to dispense with them, we take a knowing risk.

Hmm.

*

I’ve been making a(nother) attempt to learn Kannada. I decided I had gone about it all wrong in the past — all those conversational classes which told me how to buy vegetables at the market just bored me to death. I realised the only way I can get interested in a language is through its writing. So I’ve learned the script. I can now read signage of all sorts and spend a lot of time reading out shop signs to A.

More ambitiously, I’m also trying to read Girish Karnad’s ‘Yayati’. Since I can spend a total of one hour a week or something on this, I’ll probably be done with it by next year. But hey, remember the tortoise?

In the spirit of slow but sure, I love this site called Padakali which gives you one new word every day.

*

Last days in Canterbury. The sky holds its light longer each day. These last months have been both rewarding and freeing. I had burrowed into a rut and I’ve been breaking out of it, I think. It’s all the time and the poetry, the solitude, the detachment from currents.

I did a reading of my work at the university last week. I was nervous and exhilarated as usual. Some of my older, and what I think of as ‘less crafted’ poems still seemed to move people the most. This and the second one on this page have never been revised and so in essence, are what I wrote as first drafts. I’m puzzling over what this means (and hoping it doesn’t mean I should just retire). Of course, sometimes poems that work well in a reading are not the same as those that work well on the page. A poet brings certain things to their own reading of a poem that make it more than the words. But I wonder if that’s all it is.

As a reader, I like a lot of poets whose work is polished. But there are others I like whose poems are looser or even flawed. The truth is I’d rather read a poem that I get something out of — feeling or thought — even if it’s  imperfect than a lovely construction that left me cold in both ways. Even one sparkling or memorable line, image, thought trumps a series of words that sit in the right place but glisten dully.

On the note of rules, I lurked at a workshopping site for some time last year. The site is pretty strict about what makes good poetry and what does not. Obviously this has its uses, especially for beginners, but it can also lead to neat poems with the intelligence and emotional appeal of frozen meals. More harmful is the fact that they stress a singular way to write poetry. This can become a comfort zone, an old couch you grow fat in. It’s very tempting to stay there. Poetry is hard to pin down and it’s easier (less risky) to follow a set of rules than to figure out what works or doesn’t as one goes along, poem to poem, moment to moment. How messy that is! How uncontrollable. How dangerous. How much like life.

So how much revision is good revision? Somebody said (I forget who) there’s an optimum amount after which you need to stop, save the poem from your own mind or something like that. Where’s that point? I think of it like that dot in a painting by Miro, the one poet Moniza Alvi talks about, ‘Barely distinguishable from other dots, / it’s true, but quite uniquely placed.’

The dot knows where it is. And once you see it, you know where it is. But until then, it’s a a bit elusive.

Here is the poem and here is a video reading of the poem by Moniza Alvi which shows the painting.

I Would Like to Be a Dot in a Painting by Miro

I would like to be a dot in a painting by Miro.

Barely distinguishable from other dots,
it’s true, but quite uniquely placed.
And from my dark centre

I’d survey the beauty of the linescape
and wonder — would it be worthwhile
to roll myself towards the lemon stripe,

Centrally poised, and push my curves
against its edge, to give myself
a little attention?

But it’s fine where I am.
I’ll never make out what’s going on
around me, and that’s the joy of it.

The fact that I’m not a perfect circle
makes me more interesting in this world.
People will stare forever –

Even the most unemotional get excited.
So here I am, on the edge of animation,
a dream, a dance,a fantastic construction,

A child’s adventure.
And nothing in this tawny sky
can get too close, or move too far away.

~ Moniza Alvi

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.

]]> http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/03/2247/feed/ 3 http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/03/harbour/ http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/03/harbour/#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:15:59 +0000 Anindita http://aninditasengupta.com/?p=2213 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.

Given my current situation (and seductions) in life, I thought this was appropriate. It’s been a month since I got to England and barring one week of illness and a few days of being snowed in, it’s been exciting. Actually, the illness and the being snowed in were probably useful because I got some work done.

*

Serendipity: A was in Berlin three weeks back and we met at Paris for a very hectic four days. The Louvre is overwhelming in a way that leads to despair. After walking around for about ten hours, we accepted that at least a month was required to see everything. We didn’t have a month. We had just a day and we had to concede defeat. There was so much to love but discovery-wise, Chardin was interesting. The Musee D’Orsay is much more manageable than the Louvre and one of the things I liked most there was Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Four Parts of the World. I also loved The Orangerie, which has a much smaller collection but is beautifully located inside the Jardin des Tuileries. The rooms full of Monet’s Nympheas or Water Lilies are exciting and serene at the same time.

Okay, I’m not going into what else we did (the Eiffel, a river tour, walks along the Seine etc) and ate (scallops, escargots, crepes, cheese, pain au chocolat) because this is not a travel guide and Paris is not little talked about. There was also an embarrassing episode at a strip-show where we got conned but I won’t get into that either. I did feel a sort of helplessness about all the things we couldn’t find time for.  Every now and then, we had to remind ourselves that this was Paris, a city that can’t really be enjoyed in a guided-tour, monument-hopping way. We prioritised leisurely walks and meals over one or two important sights and adopted Indian fatalism about visiting again soon.

*

British poet Drew Milne came to read at the university. You can see his work here and here. What do you think? I’m still trying to make up my mind about it. Frankly, my first reaction was not intense. But maybe, I’ll change my mind. I don’t know.

*

There was a guest lecture about ecopoetries in America. The speaker went on a bit about Americans and their special relationship to their land. It made me think about our relationship to our land. Especially now that we see it disappearing under construction rubble in cities like Bangalore. It also made me think about some of Ramanujan’s poems, especially A River which has these lovely lines:

People everywhere talked
of the inches rising,
of the precise number of cobbled steps
run over by the water, rising
on the bathing places,
and the way it carried off three village houses,
one pregnant woman
and a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda as usual.

And these…

He said:
the river has water enough
to be poetic
about only once a year

*

I haven’t taken too many pictures in London yet, mainly because I’ve been busy doing other things like being completely turned on, obsessed and orgasmic — to continue with the seduction trope — about the Poetry Library. I can’t really explain how moving it is to be in a library devoted to poetry. And they allow you to read and borrow books for free. I know I sound like I want to squeal with joy. But I felt like Gretel finding that magic house made of chocolate and candy in the woods. Minus the witch.

I’ve also been busy visiting more museums, spending time with an old friend and watching movies. Also, Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour made my birthday pretty special.

But here is a gull looking at the Thames. Doesn’t he look like he’s thinking hard?

]]> http://aninditasengupta.com/2010/02/the-seductive-snowball/feed/ 7 http://aninditasengupta.com/2009/11/postcards-from-amritsar-golden-temple/ http://aninditasengupta.com/2009/11/postcards-from-amritsar-golden-temple/#comments Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:54:00 +0000 Anindita http://aninditasengupta.com/?p=1822 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

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.

For some time, a woman with two kids came and sat down next to me. With both kids. One in her lap and the other squashed between us. I tried to think kind thoughts about the goodness of children and so on but it was quite uncomfortable to sit like that, four people on two seats, and I was relieved when they moved to other seats.

There was another woman with a tiny baby just across the aisle and there was much crying and feeding activity going on. The man next to her looked so indifferent to both of them that I was quite surprised when she tapped his arm at their stop and he left with them. Daddy, I guess.

Jalandhar is a major stop on the route and most people got off there. I almost got off too because I asked someone if we had reached Amritsar already and this person said yes. Anyway, the bus driver, a gruff old Sardarji, looked at me as if I was daft when I went up to the front. Understandably. Then he growled ‘Amritsar is two hours away’.  Then he went on to ask me if someone was picking me up at the bus station since I was reaching at 10.30 pm, insisted that it was not safe for me to take a cab from there, insisted that I call the hotel and get them to send a taxi and paced about until I had sorted this out. Through all this, he maintained customary gruffness of expression and voice.

Not to generalise and all that, but yeah, Sardarji completely lived up to the famed Punjabi reputation for friendliness despite the gruff exterior.

The incident also reminded me of a conversation I had with someone about the kindness of strangers. She’s a reluctant traveler and was quizzing me about how I manage ‘all alone’. I casually said I’ve always been lucky enough to find nice strangers whenever I needed help. ‘But isn’t that a bit risky,’ she asked, ‘to trust strangers.’ And of course it is, now that I think about it.

The truth is I’m always getting into situations while traveling. (See here and here and I haven’t even gone into how I landed up in Jo’burg with way less money than I had planned to carry…I forgot one pouch at home. So that was just plain careless but we’ll let it go. Okay? Okay. ) But so far, I’ve always been lucky in unexpected ways. Random acts of kindness, the mercy of strangers, that sort of thing.

I don’t have any logical reason or rules for this really. Except that sometimes, one has to take help from any quarters. And as we move around more and more, strangers are often our only bet. (Vaguely related is this 2008 study that the world is, in general, trusting strangers more and more as evinced by the rise of social media.)

Also, the greatest betrayals sometimes come from the closest people so you can never be too safe in any case.

Note: I’m not recommending that anyone run out and hitchhike across India or befriend random people on the streets and so on.

The festival ran for an entire week with poetry readings and performances every evening. These lasted about three hours and attracted substantial crowds which I found amazing considering that here, when we get 50 people for a reading, we are ready to drop to our knees in thanksgiving. Poets performed in English, Afrikaans, Isizulu, French, Portuguese and Turkish. There was a strong element of protest in some of the poetry. Some of us currently writing English poetry in India tend to avoid rousing political statements so it was a shake-up to experience a culture where statements are still common, even expected, in poems. I tend to be wary of agenda-driven poetry, mostly because I think a lot of it is just plain bad. There’s a tendency to fall back on the power of the emotion or situation and not bother with the craft. At the same time, our political beliefs do inform who we are as people, and as a natural outcome, what and how we write. And I did hear some good-brilliant protest poetry. I suppose the question to ask with any poem — political or otherwise — is whether it’s a strong poem as opposed to (merely) being a strong statement. It was wonderful that many of us agreed on some of the things that make a strong poem: complexity of thought, musicality of language, specificity, sensory detail.

At a more personal level, it was fantastic to be among so many poets. The eccentric energies, the insecurities, the plain oddness that often make me worry about being let loose in public seemed to have found their correct roosting place, almost like coming home. Okay, on that dreadfully sentimental note (many of us also agreed that sentiment is to be abhorred in poetry), I will stop and give shout-outs to some of my festival favourites, people whose work I loved. So in no particular order:

Liesl Jobson who is editor of the South Africa section of Poetry International Web. She writes poetry, short stories and flash fiction. Her work is wry and biting, quietly powerful and elegantly crafted. There’s strong imagery and great sonic effects. And she talks about the heavy stuff with subtlety. You can read one of her poems here and here is an extract from the poem ‘Zulu Love Letter’ which is in her latest collection View from an Escalator. It’s a longish poem that talks about motherhood, memory and the threat of loss at a personal level but manages to set this against the larger context of what’s happening in her nation without seeming contrived. I’ve picked my favourite stanza:

Each night counting these glass fragments under my fingernails
I remember Ma’Msomi’s valley where AIDS swallows
children, spits up mounds of rusty earth without headstones
and try to remember that custody battles are not terminal.

Loftus Marais writes in Afrikaans and his debut collection Staan in die algemeen nader aan vensters has picked up a number of awards. His poems sound wonderful when read aloud and I loved the translations I read though I’m sure the originals are better. You can read one of the translations here (though it’s one of his shorter poems). Here’s a youtube recording of a reading and I will post another translation here soon if I can.

Lesego Rampolokeng’s work churns with a furious energy and watching him perform is really an experience. As a person, he’s as frank, no-holds-barred and intense as he is while performing so it’s also quite an experience  to interact with him. Here’s a poem you can read and another, and here is a feature on him.

And Jennifer Ferguson whose voice is electric, and who is also (and as importantly) a fabulous woman. Listen to her here. Or visit her myspace page for most recent stuff.

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.

Not snow geese, these. But beautiful all the same. Or at least, i think so. I’ve always liked geese despite their honking and their ill reputation as silly creatures. I think it’s because of ‘the ugly duckling’, one of my favourite fairy tale characters when i was little. Anyway, these were pets at one of the resorts where i stayed. They recently bred goslings, and grown-ups and babies were all having a jolly time in the green-brown pool.

And here is the poem ‘Snow Geese’ by Mary Oliver. Clearly, she likes geese too.

We get lost a lot. On our way up to Thadiyendamol and back, we try shortcuts, jump the wrong walls, run up deeply mossed steps to the other side of the mountain. There is a feeling of constantly traveling sideways. Then there are the women. At a dead-end in the forest, a bland white house and in the verandah, a woman who fixes us with her mad eyes as if she knows our deepest secrets. Later, after a crossing of streams, a tribal woman who smiles in relief as if she likes unexpected guests, gives us water from her groundwater tap. I am struck by our differences, all of us, women standing on the same small bit of mountain.

About E, what stays with me are not the specifics so much as a ‘mood’, the air she carries about her — of adventure bordering on foolhardiness, and the kind of innocence that Indian girls must lose pretty quickly. E is not wary, furtive, careful, or cold around men she passes on the streets. She smiles, says hello. They look bemused, shy or amused depending on their age and general proclivities. When I am with her during these exchanges,  I look away, am often caught between grimace and smile. You see, I’m not used to such warmth with strange men. I’m more the ‘look through – look down – look sternly ahead’ kinda girl. This difference in our behaviour makes me think of the places we grew up in, the ways in which we grew up.

I wonder what it would be like to walk down a road and not see men as  potential trouble. To not shuffle or scuttle or sidle by.

***

After I got back, I rather instinctively googled  ‘russia women’ to find out more about gender constructs in modern-day Russia.  I say ‘instinctively’ because if I had stopped to think, I would have remembered the stereotype and expected the gadzillion dating and marriage sites I was hit with. Of course, I quickly modified my search with ‘gender relations’, ‘freedom of mobility’.  But I discovered little because the sea of dating sites and other stereotypes swamped everything else.

There were more putrid examples like this, but also reasonably innocent-sounding ones. This blogger talks about this phenomenon in some detail:

According to Google, all Russian women strive for one thing: a marriage with a foreigner. The first link that came up stated “All Russian Women Want to Escape from Russia” –  with an only intention of finding a foreign partner, of course….The ‘Russian woman’ as been turned into a brand by the internet.  I am surprised no one has registered the Russian Woman trademark yet. (Or has someone?)

Clearly, we have no other desires but to popularize ourselves with handsome foreign strangers who will whip out their cyber guides, make us borsch, and will then whisk us away from our homeland. Do women in other cultures have a better digital reputation?

So using the same, rather loose attitude-mapping tool, I googled ‘India women’. The top link was something about ’100 beautiful Indian women’ but most of the other links on the first page dealt with women’s problems in one form or another — an article on the Mangalore bar attacks, a UN report on women’s status, a dated, bleak census report on women’s health. And I wondered if all of us are just traveling sideays after all, in our own corners of the world.

I pull the curtain aside to trees outlined against the dark like giant ghosts.  The iPod beats a tune. I feel clear, unfogged. This is unusual — I am not a morning person. Forests at night can be suffocating in their density, a jumble of shadows. But the plantations of Coorg are different. Orderly in their beauty. Immensely cheerful. I catch some of this, even at this hour, like this.

A little later, I stand shivering at Virajpet bus station, cursing the cab driver who has not turned up. It is the darkest hour of night and the town looks scary as sleeping towns tend to. Nearby, a parked auto rickshaw with three men inside talking in low murmurs. A truck glows lurid yellow under a street lamp. There may be people inside but I’m not sure.  I try to look as inconspicuous as possible, given the fact that my jacket is fire-engine red. I  distract myself by thinking of how I will relate this little adventure once I’m home and safe.

When my cabbie arrives — Raja who has a bad cold and no handkerchief — I am relieved, as if I have met someone I love after many years. I collapse into the seat and forgive him. Because he has clearly dressed in a hurry. Because I am tired and need to pee. And because I love Coorg and am full of the joy of that.

The road from Virajpet to Kakkabe, higher up at the foothills of the Thadiyendamol peak, takes 45 minutes at this time. The road is smooth and Raja is friendly without being familiar. He asks me where I am from. Bangalore, I say. ‘No, native place?’ I hesitate. ‘Calcutta?’ I offer. ‘He seems satisfied, as if I have confirmed something. He has lived his whole life in Virajpet. I try to imagine the boundaries of his life.

We reach the home-stay an hour later and I tumble into my bed for a nap after watching dawn break over the hills. I wake up after two hours and step out of my room to this.

***

Blog posts on the trip may seem a bit disjointed. This is because I was in Coorg and Kabini to do some resort reviews and can’t say much without impinging on my stories.

And that one over there was my perennial threat from Nana. “If you don’t eat like a lady, how will I take you to the Taj?” And so I fed my face like a well-trained robot lady at 6, because the Taj, as we know, is The Taj, and every 7-year-old dreams of a Shamiana ice cream with a pink biscuit stuck in it. In college, our parent Rotary held its weekly meetings at the Ballroom and we’d gatecrash them on flimsy pretexts so we could devour pastries from the Sea Lounge. It was earlier this month that the Boy and I strolled outside the ‘old’ Taj while I narrated the story of Watson’s Hotel and how an insult founded this magnificent structure.

And then there’s yet that other one, the Victoria Terminus that was our pride as we carted suitably admiring foreign visitors around, reveling in what was ours. The first train in India chuffed off from here we’d point out, as their eyes took in the gargoyles and gothic grandeur. So many bleary-eyed childhood trips were flagged off from its innards. Two minutes away at college, we’d laugh about how every Hindi movie has its one obligatory VT shot to depict arrival in Mumbai. What would we know about arrival, chronic natives that we were.