Dad's Diary 7 - Artiste of the Hyemal Kind

Biltu was a coward, a reticent, and an introvert so long as the sun rays poured on him. Thin and lanky, his eyes glistened at dusk, and there emerged a totally different personality in enveloping darkness. He had a rare gift of combining frivolity with recklessness in his nocturnal activities.

The long winter holidays in the school afforded Biltu the opportunity to undertake perilous undertakings. It was outrightly dangerous to be with him in his projects, and a shortcoming to miss them. He boasted of being a 'performing artiste of the hyemal kind.'

Of the numerous pranks, the most striking one even faced an intensive though unsuccessful police inquiry. The police came to the neighborhood and questioned all the boys. Biltu was luckily interrogated during his 'solar affliction.' True to his nature, he winced, trembled and stammered his way out. He was not daring enough to pull such a job, the police presumably concluded.

Wintry Darjeeling, nestled in the Himalayan foothills, forced people, particularly at night, to wrap up heavy woolens from head to foot, making movement up the road awkward and slow. The oldies even added thick mufflers on top of balaclava caps that virtually kept only the eyes bare.

Equipped with a black balaclava cap Biltu used to spread out all ten fingers, palms facing backwards, elbows partly folded, crouch-walk silently in a peculiar gait, stand erect right behind his unsuspecting victim, and shrilly shout, 'aau aau' several times before running away the way he came.

He used to pull back his Adam's apple, and force the vocal chord to let out the gibberish sound coupled with a nasal tone in an unearthly fury. The impact was tremendously traumatic. Many a victim, usually a solitary figure in a deserted street, actually cried out in panic.

One such night we spotted a man sauntering his way laboriously up the hilly terrain. Biltu took a couple of deep breath, and silently went on his crouch-walk. We waited with bated breath. The 'aau aau-s' broke the silence, but something was amiss. Instead of at least four times it was uttered only twice.

Two movements occurred simultaneously. The victim clutched his stomach and sat down on the road, and Biltu took a different escape route. We waited in vain for him to reappear. There was no trace of him for the next four days.

Our patience exhausted, we hazarded a visit to his residence. His father came out to announce that Biltu had been grounded for the rest of the winter holidays. “And don't you boys mix up with that bad boy, or he will get you all in trouble.”

After much persuasion, we were granted ten minutes with Biltu inside his bedroom. The 'performing artiste of the hyemal kind' was in a bleak mood.

“I nearly busted his hernia,” Biltu whispered rapidly, “that man was my father. Unlike others he had looked back, we looked into each other's eyes just for a moment, and that was enough for recognition.” His 'solar affliction' was cured after the incident, he informed us, instead he was now afraid of the darkness. Perhaps it was now a case of 'lunar morbidity,' he speculated, as we took his leave.


BY TAPAS MUKHERJEE

Blog Trotting

There is another atmospheric layer apart from the ones we already know of. At the risk of raised eyebrows and sarcastic comments, I will have to insist on this fact. I know cause I am living in it now. It primarily consists of letters and pictures - not unlike books sans the physical pages, the insane smell of print and glossy covers . It is called Blogosphere... 

Blogosphere is a multi-colored layer spanning from the Earth right through Troposhere and ending in Exosphere. It is mainly composed of emotions, experiences, stories, poetry, photography, quizzes and much more. The inhabitants here survive on “followers” and “comments”. Without these they shrivel and die a sad death. I roam this layer much like a tourist now and am awed by its magnanimity and power. However, I do aspire to stay on and hence I came armed with a whole lot of luggage to add to Blogosphere. The hope that remains is I don't end up polluting it. 

My journey began on an uneventful evening, when a thought just fleeted into my head. Of course I was facebooking at the time. My eyes suddenly strayed to the left hand corner of the page where a I saw a link that said "create your own group". Little did I know then that this was just the beginning of a lure that would hold me in my place for quite a while. Having nothing to do I quickly acted on it, created a "Ladies Club" and invited a few friends to join it. It started with 5 gals and has quickly grown to more than 200 talented members now. Most of them I still haven't met but somehow these ladies slowly took over a substantial part of  my waking hours. It was as if I knew them through and through all my life. Ladies Club became so addictive that I easily ringed out at least 5 hours a day for it. Suddenly this group had all this literature that they brought back from Blogosphere that completely enveloped me. 

So far my knowledge of writers were limited to the ones that were published - whose books I read and the names I googled.  To my complete amazement I was now face to face with people who ink amazing literature, as easily as taking a sip of tea, and for the most part don't even realize their own worth. I was introduced to Blogosphere by Alpana (from the club) and her lessons in life.  As time went by, I had to just take a stroll to Rimly's for some mesmerizing sensuous poetry and heartfelt experiences;  Yoshay's gothic literature at its peak will take over you completely, to be blown over by versatility stop by Sulekha's; Lavina even promises a drink while we read about the most interesting events, places and people; to have a light moment check out Priya's amazement at the entire world but herself and Clooney; small incidents in  Sukanya's life make fabulous short stories; Nina's take on movies, literature, life, food etc is just the place to go for a quick recommendation and entertainment, Chokher will easily win your heart with her poetry, Eva's honest portrayal of world through photographs and prose makes you wonder again - why isn't she famous??? Why is Vani not rolling in money? In the meantime I cannot stop reveling at the fact that when these women do get published I would know a handful of famous people.

By this time, I was convinced not only to travel to Blogosphere but stay there for the rest of my life. One fine day, Providence just sent me the ticket as a small pleasant surprise. The ticket had "Bloggers Network" written in bold across it. I grabbed it with all my might and left. As promised, the ticket took me  to the most scenic place in the atmospheric layer - Derek ruled this layer  - he was the leader of the pack, an undisputed chief in the newly coined marketing tool called - social media. Here I met even more fabulous talents - Roy, Sweepy, Ardith, Jim, John, Abhishek, Pandora, Prithwijit, Charles, Ricky, Ed , still another Jim, a whole conglomeration of writers and even more people have become my utmost favorite in this world.... they have it all. Blogger's Network opened up even more avenues for me to check out and I moved with a curious soul...

They were even children that floated in Blogosphere - I was amazed at the depth of their feelings - one would probably not even know the intensity of their thoughts if it hadn't been penned down. Joyee’s maturity besieged me while Ishaan’s thoughts revealed the intricacies that can hover in a little brain…

 I have been here for about 4 months now and have finally been given a temporary visa called ‘howaboutthis’. The status could only change to 'permanent' if I abide by the laws of Blogospere and am able to contribute meaningful matter to it while getting enough fodder for survival. My journey continues ... 

An article by me on - We have a story

Dad's Diary 5 - Of Blood and Tears, and Hills and Humor

Sunset - nature at its wildest in Darjeeling

Darjeeling hills and surrounding areas are seething once again under the impact of a political movement that shows no sign of abating. The demand is for creation of a separate state of 'Gorkhaland' outside West Bengal. 

I was there when it was intensified in the mid-1980s by Gorkha National Liberation Front. The man responsible was the party's charismatic supremo, Subas Ghisingh. The movement is now being spearheaded by Gorkha Janamukti Morcha which has wrested the leadership from the GNLF. But that is not my story.

There is no dearth of armed political movement in India. Everywhere the crux of the story is that of a peoples' movement of blood and tears, of bullets and bombs. What, however, distinguishes Darjeeling movement is that the people and political leaders somehow retained their innate humor, even though at times it bordered on uncivil crudeness.

Traitors to the cause were decapitated, and the heads were hung at congested public places. The whispering campaign against betrayal that followed did not threaten beheading, but that the traitor's “height would be shortened by six inches!”

Unsuccessful police raids for the arrest of illegal bomb makers were characterized as “peeling onions layer by layer” on the part of the security forces. Police swooped down at dawn on areas where alleged culprits were hiding, only to find the area deserted. This was “pressing on a half-filled air-pillow,” obviously meaning that the fleeing people had filled up another part of the area.

A renewed refusal of the government to concede to the 'Gorkhaland' demand was once described by Subas Ghisingh in this manner: “There are many people who bring the ax on their own toes; but the West Bengal chief minister is rushing to strike his toes on the ax.”   

Such sarcasm found expression in describing the activities of some of his own pals. Chhatre Subba, a former army man like Ghisingh, was raising a 'Gorkhaland army,' promising his gullible men ample supply of Chinese arms and equipment to be smuggled in from Tibet in none too distant future. In the meantime, he would manufacture arms locally.

View from Tiger Hill - Darjeeling

Here is what Ghisingh had to say about that : “Chhatre's bullets don't kill. You know why? After firing, the bullet goes straight for some distance, and then turns side-wise before hitting the target.”

Chhatre Subba even built a cannon, and invited Ghisingh to inspect its  operations. Ghisingh : “Chhatre first filled up head-end of the cannon with dozens of match sticks in absence of lighting-explosives, and set fire to it. Boom, it went, leaving plumes of smoke behind. The cannon itself flew out and fell some distance away; I nearly jumped as I caught sight of Chhatre. He was plastered with black soot; so was I”.

When they became bitter enemies, Subba even made an attempt on Ghisingh's life. Ghisingh survived the attack. Subba had used a sophisticated AK 47 rifle, and nobody has since then heard Ghisingh complain about bullets hitting side-wise.

In those days young boys, particularly teenagers, found real time adventure in the movement. Playing pranks to ease up the tension was very much the in-thing. 

A group of teenagers, rope-bound to each other, were made to wait outside the judicial building pending their production before the judge. Why were they here? “Murder,” they chorused, uttering the pinnacle of offenses with as much nonchalance as would enable them to momentarily outlive their miserable teens.

In the hustle and bustle of court proceedings, the boys killed the heavy load of time by an ingenuous game. They had rolled up a ball with waste papers and strings lying about, and were passing it around themselves. But that was not the real game, only the cover for a more nefarious and hilarious activity at the same time.

The rolling tea gardens

One dexterous marksman among them placed pebbles in between his middle finger and thumb in both hands, and flipped them with remarkable aim at policemen and lawyers. Whenever  a contact was made the irate victim looked at them only to find a group of apparent street urchins totally absorbed in an innocent game of passing the ball.

 Faced with increasing incidence of 'eve teasing' amidst general lawlessness the police resorted to catching the 'Romeos' with 'amorous' long hair, force them into saloons, and make them pay for the hair cuts. The 'Romeos' soon responded by remaining indoors, and the program strayed into catching anybody with pony tails.

In such a situation, one day my daughter brought home a budding musician to introduce to me. “This is Jay,” she said, as if that was the whole explanation. I looked up from my book to find a boy with lustrous outcrop on his head that tumbled down well below his shoulders. Indeed no more explanation was needed.

What had long hair got to do with music? He was the 'lead guitarist' in the band, he wailed, and would lose his placement if he bore an ignominious crew cut. The prospect of losing his identity was quite despicable for him. I had to pull some strings with friends in the police administration to save Jay's 'guitarist icon'. But interference in such matters was quite risky as would the following incident proved.

The local government-run hospital administration had adopted a policy of making available medical treatment to all including those being sought by the police to save the building from getting burnt down. One late night five boys rushed in carrying a stretcher with a patient who had swathe of dirty white bandages on his head and hands, the elbows jutting out with extra paddings.

As soon as they placed the stretcher on the corridor they started shouting slogans against the government for inadequate medical arrangements. Doctors and attendants led by the senior nurse rushed out to take care of the patient.

One boy caught the doctor by the collar, pinned him against the wall, and raised a fist only to find himself bodily lifted and thrashed down. Even before others could take stock of the situation, another boy found the floor as his resting place. The strong senior nurse with her pointed high boots had gone to work on the boys with such a feline ferocity that the table was turned even before it was really set.

Kanchendzonga - a sight only lucky tourists get to see

In the melee the first person to escape the hospital was the 'unconscious' patient. He abandoned his stretcher and ran out of the hospital; three blobs of white bandage, the head and two elbows, receded into the darkness with such speed that it could hardly be matched by even a healthy runner. He was followed by the rest of the gang.

Two days later intermediaries worked out a deal for the return of the stretcher that the boys had borrowed from a social service club; they had to explain their conduct to the senior nurse. They confessed to having selected the hospital which was supposed to be a 'soft target' for slogan shouting and rampage after they had had an overdose of 'chhang' (millet beer). The mock patient even shed a few drops of tear.

“Take your stinky stretcher and get out,” the senior nurse ordered. The boys collected the stretcher and saved themselves the hefty fine they had to pay to the service club. They looked back from the main door; the formidable senior nurse was tapping the floor under her high boots; the mock patient wiped his fake tears, and whispered, “Now.”

“Stinky nurse, stinky socks, stinky boots,” they shouted several times, slogan style, before running away. The slogan did justice to the points of contact they had suffered at the hands (or rather at the feet) of the senior nurse.


BY TAPAS MUKHERJEE

Dad's Diary 4 - Agneya aka Agni aka Gungun aka Guni - My Fire

Sparkling whiteness interrupted by a hint of rusty reddish fluidity caved into a black mouth that gobbled up the last vestige of my precious possession – a touch and a smell. The pounding of the washing machine matched my heart's beating that created an uncontrollable fluttering murmur in it.

Agni flaunting a new dress when she was 3 months

She had embraced me tightly, her soft weightless hands on my shoulders, her cheek on mine, as she whispered the oft-repeated avowals with the newest of bewitching tunes - “I love you, I miss you.” My shirt collar quivered under the impact of the whisper. And now the pounding mechanical demon in which my shirt was being washed, was beating the touch and the smell, pouring torrents of water to wash a tear away.

But the memory lingers. The God's own machine that this body is lovingly preserves such moments. “Know wherever there is a spark of unselfish love, I am there,” the universal Flute Player assures, “for I am that spark of love.” Undiminished, unceasing, that will stay with me as an infinite moment caught within the finite-web of life.

She is an all absorbing flame flickering out caressing moments of warmth to beat the cold of this life, announcing her presence with unceasing rapture, “Are you happy?”, “Are you OK?”. Even a trace of sadness triggers off these non-stop queries till she sees a smile, and is satisfied of a job well done. Then she adds, “I love you,” “I miss you,” with unfailing regularity.

She is Agneya aka Agni and Gungun aka Guni, my nearly 22-month old granddaughter, as of now the last of our three grandchildren. She is flame, whisper, skillful, as her names suggest, all rolled into one.  

Just the right fit

Surprisingly a super quick learner, she walked, skipping crawling altogether, up to her bedroom door when she was 6-month old, and issued a guttural sound to make her presence felt. Later we learned to identify the sound to her being angry. Today her anger is expressed by an emphatic 'uhh ohh' that she is fond of uttering it to all and sundry.  

Seized by uhh-ohhing mood, she chooses a victim to dampen his or her mood. If the victim does not break down in tears, she orders, “start to cry.” Obliging her guarantees the victim a warm hug accompanied by soothing, “I love you, I miss you.”   

She learned to use action words with alacrity, “Are you cooking? I am playing.” After her efforts lead to make a statement like, “I am 'funnying' in the shower,” while taking a bath, she receives the correction with great aplomb, “OK,” she says seriously. But 'aich-em” for elephant and 'gibal' for giraffe, two of her earliest tongue twisting utterances, still remain. 'Krincho' to Krishna took a couple of days, and had come to stay.

With her favorite teddy

Once Guni found me reading a book at a time she was obsessed about asking questions of all sorts. “Are you booking?” she asked me. Anxious to finish the paragraph I was on, I sent her out on an errand. She now had the onerous responsibility of informing her father that she was his daughter. She went muttering away, and before long she was overheard asking her father, “Are you Arijit's daughter?”

She hands me over a book. “Come on read,” she says impatiently. She listens to the unfathomable story for a while, abruptly closes the book, and, “finish,” she announces with finality. But she can detect if the reader is cheating by reading from some other materials instead of the book she had handed over. And that is not acceptable.

Ladybug on Halloween

Guni is crazy about rhymes as most babies are. But her ability to form strategies to get things done for herself is admirable. Once she had been calling me from outside the room repeatedly, which I ignored just to see what happened next. She came right up to me and rasped out, “You walk,” and then she grabbed a tiny fistful of my pajama, and led me to the TV table. There she promptly stretched out on the carpeted floor, and instructed me, “down”. I lay down beside her, and obligingly turned over. She pointed under the table, “Blue ball – bring.” I did earn a hug and a 'thank you.' 

She usually lets loose a spate of hi, hello, and  'I love yous' at malls and restaurants, but has strong liking and disliking about who is touching her. Even as my younger daughter, Kriti, ended her particularly slogging pregnancy, Joyee (my elder daughter, Swati's, first born) indiscreetly inquired, “Is she better looking than me?” Earlier she had summed up the situation, saying, her own brother, Ishaan, had robbed half of her life away, and now the “oncoming problem” would rob the other half.

When the siblings visited 2-month old Guni in the US, Joyee and Guni looked at each other with furtive side-wise glances, and Guni literally flowed into Joyee's outstretched arms. The discernible acceptance of each other was complete in a moment and all others heaved a sigh of relief.

Guni impressed Joyee so overwhelmingly that the latter blogged the following words on the former:

“You look amazing. I am the happiest elder sister to have you! You are the cutest thing I've ever seen! I am gonna be there for you always. I love you infinite.”

Showing off her first few pearls 

People often accost Guni's mother to have a better look at the child. Once I saw a man who had crossed us at a mall but had run back shouting for us to stop. “Don't be so selfish,” he had chided, “Oh! Look at those great eyes! You oughta let the world share your joy too.” It's her spectacular eyes that have stopped many a passer by in many a place. In Cleopatra's time, much less would have warranted the launching of a thousand war ships!

Her bluish gray eyeballs, encircled by a black ring, betray an oceanic depth only when she is lost in her own thoughts. At other times all kinds of truant thoughts wave up and down into them.

Leaving her in the US on coming back to India, as I stood with fluttering heart before the merciless washing machine, Guni demanded of her mother over twelve thousand aerial kilometers away, pointing to the bed I had occupied, “Sleep  ... that bed.” Did she want to extract the last ounce of my touch and smell that lingered in my bed?

BY TAPAS MUKHERJEE

Dad's Diary 3 - 'Joyee is an Enigma'

Joyee is an enigma. A riddle in which the pieces never fell into their assigned places till she started to knock on the teens-door. But she has yet remained to be an unsolved puzzle in her totality.

Joyee with her pet Rushtu when she
was much younger

We had all crowded the nursing home lobby the day she was born, the first of our three grandchildren. An hour or so after her eagerly awaited arrival, a smiling nurse raised her before a see-through glass panel. I remarked almost involuntarily, “A bundle of divinity.” Indrani, my wife, agreed with an ear to ear smile, but pointed out that she had furrowed her forehead and had been crying non-stop noisily, not happy at all to be out in the world.

She plainly had a grouse against the world right up to age 3. But that's when I had a different glimpse of her own tiny world. Fatema, a household-help, a divorcee with two kids, one Joyees's age, and one a few months old, was instrumental in opening that special door. This was in Bangalore. 

On that morning of revelation Fatema came to work in a foul mood. Her former husband was still giving her trouble. On top of that Joyee's contemporary kid was proving too much troublesome. Fatema took the child out in the veranda, and started giving vent to her own frustration on the child. The muffled wailing warned Joyee who jumped down from her bed and scurried out.

Joyee in one of her moods 

What attracted my attention was the coincidence of disappearance of Joyee's legs into the veranda and total silence outside. I hurried out. Joyee's tiny world appeared to be going round and round the only conceivable sun in it, Fatema's 3-year old, on which a silent Goddess spread her body, face down, creating a veritable shield between the sobbing child and her tormenting mother. Fatema stood there awestruck.

When her mother had brought home her brother a year earlier she had shrieked, “Where have you brought him from? Throw him away.” But when she was barely 6, she once locked her eyes into mine with fury oozing out of hers, raised her pointer, and warned me, “Slow down, he is only a baby.” All I

did was to rebuke her brother for nagging, and brought my arm down on the wooden table with some force. I still remember that look, and of course I was the one to blink first.

Joyee was fond of going to the Gul Mohar Club, Delhi, to play with other children. Before coming  home at dusk she routinely visited the library where she read the newspapers amidst the fathers and grandfathers of the area. “Reading newspapers at home is not much fun,” was her view. That must have prepared her for taking to writing seriously when the residence changed from Gul Mohar colony to Sheikh Sarai which had no club of her liking. Today, at age-13, she boasts of a blog spot of her own (joyee-bhattacharya.blogspot.com) where she  has plunged into airing her rather radical views about life and living.

Miss Beautiful

She got herself equipped with a harmonium, tabla (drum), and a music teacher to learn singing, classical ones, and gave up her efforts nearly a year and half  later presumably because it drastically eroded into her time for reading and writing. Two years earlier her school teacher assigned the class to assume any character from 'Cinderella' and write that character's feelings at midnight at the prince's dancing party. Joyee sprang a surprise by choosing to be the wall clock pouring out its heart for Cinderella.

Like her wildly swinging mood between positive and negative poles, Joyee's love for literature does evenly match her hatred for mathematics. To quote from her blog, “I hate it more than smelly socks, lizards, cockroaches, or puke.” When she is seized of math homework problem, any reference to her brother's prowess in it could land anyone in deep enough misery.

She has even gone public about her relations with her parents : “We fight, I scream, you ground me, I disobey you, and at times even raise my voice against yours which always lands me into deep deep trouble. But whatever I am today is because I had you with me. I love you.”

Her father now-a-days is acutely conscious of her presence anywhere. One day he came back home from work, extremely preoccupied with some problems, missed Joyee's - 'hello baba' – but   acknowledged his son's (Ishaan) greetings a step away. The 'spitfire' quipped immediately, “Am I non-existent or invisible?” Her father hurriedly retraced his steps and gave her a warm hug to save the situation, and also himself from the trouble of suffering a long lecture on the philosophy of fairness and justness in righteous indignation.

When she takes my breath away

The 3-year old toddler's 'noch yer fend' (not your friend) rebuffs a dozen times by breakfast has amply graduated into a tempestuous tongue lashing whenever she can seize an opportunity. She is avowedly a 'no nonsense' girl – sorry, 'super woman' - placed to deal with a nonsensical world as a member of the “weaker sex”. I keep telling her if all the women could somehow emulate her diatribes, the definition of “weaker sex” may have to be redrawn.

And it is precisely for that reason my love for the eldest of my grandchildren is tinged with growing respect.

  

     

Dad's Diary 2 - Bengalis should stick to yapping!!

Tapas with son-in-laws and grandchildren
 (Agni and Ishaan)

 Grandchildren are beings of beauty and joy forever. I have three of them from my two daughters, loving and admirable mothers in their own right. My wife, Indrani, and I often compare the way they deal with their children with our way when they were kids.

I have a new pastime now; comparing the memory of my own situations then with my grand-children's now, and marvel at how time flies.

Ishaan was nine years old when this happened. He had gone out to play with his friends. I noticed from the window that he was running faster than the wind towards home as if being chased by a pack of howling street dogs. He spotted me at the window and shouted for the entrance door to be opened immediately. He rushed inside, and before I had time to close the door, the reason for Ishaan's panic, his nemesis, in the shape of an assembly of half a dozen girls, all aged between six and nine, stood panting before me.

Granddaughters Agni and Joyee (L-R)

I heard the chorus demanding Ishaan's mother to be summoned in total confusion. I was ready to grab any hint from him, but he wouldn't even look at me. So I tried the other end of the problem. I explained that his mother was not at home, and hurriedly volunteered the information that his father was not available either. But if they enlightened me about the state of affairs, I could take it up with his parents when they returned home.

They kind of sized up the wizened old man blocking the doorway, exchanged glances, and then a girl of

'perhaps-seven' pointed out another and blurted out, “Usne usko 'I love you' bola” (He said 'I love you' to her).

A knot started tightening in my stomach with intensifying efforts not to burst out laughing. The responsibility now was onerous enough. So I looked at the irate group with as much seriousness as was possible, and tried to talk out of the fast deteriorating situation.

“Toh kya hua?” (So what?) I ventured. “He does that all the time with everybody. He tells that to me, to his grandmother, to his mother, father, sister. It’s good that he loves everybody. That is no reason for you to get angry.”

Ishaan and Agni

I quickly looked back to see if Ishaan had caught on to the hint. The dull-dumb expression was gone. His eyes glistened with shrewd appreciation and the usual naughty smile hovered back on his lips. The knot in my tummy remained disconcerting.

Then came the femme-punchline: “Oisa nahi, usne dusri-wali love you bola” (not that type, he said the other kind of 'I love you'), 'perhaps-seven' thundered, her eyes sauntering over to the cover of film magazine lying on a nearby table on which an actor and his consort remained frozen in a romantic posture.

This was now too much for me to handle with the tummy-knot holding the laughter came very much near to an explosion. The situation was saved by a holler from the doorway of a neighboring house ordering two of the girls including the spokes-person, 'perhaps-seven,' to get back home. My promise to let Ishaan's mother know about their gracious visit and bitter complaints persuaded the other four to retreat.

I cannot match Ishaan's record of romantic adventures when I was nine. But here is one that would prove that I was also endowed with the rare quality of creating problems where none existed.

It happened in Darjeeling at a time when a series of Phantom and Tarzan comics gradually built up a sense of invincibility in me. And I was itching to try some of their fighting skill, the killer moves having been practiced time and again in my imagination. The opportunity was also not far away.

That fateful evening, as I climbed up the public staircase to reach the upper level of the road leading to the main market, I had no inkling that I was entering my own African wild.

I stood for a while at the top of the staircase trying to decide whether to go up the serpentine road or down. A lump of spittle released from the first floor window perched on the clothesline below and sprinkled out a few drops on my shoulder. A thousand Phantom and Tarzan invaded and possessed my whole being. Aite's face appeared at the window. He smiled malevolently.

'Come down here and wipe the spittle off my shoulder,' I ordered menacingly. Aite came down clasping a pencil cutter so dirty and rusted that together they would be more fatal than its edge. In two swift moves I got him down on the road. I was myself appalled at the prolific application of imaginary moves!

Then there loomed large my father's rather extremely handsome and well-built countenance some distance away. He had not noticed me, and I decamped from the scene carrying the knife as the victor's trophy. The initial euphoria later gave way to regrets as I ran the moves in my mind, and was sure that I indeed had ample opportunity to land two, at least one, 'deadly fist-blow' and another 'equally deadly boot-kick'. But it was time for me to constantly look over my shoulders to avoid any unhealthy surprises.

Another week later all my preemptive arrangements proved hilarious. Nothing happened. Aite had just vanished into thin air. I relaxed my vigil, and once more found time to say, not 'I love you-s', but potently bewitching 'namastes and good mornings, god evenings,' to pre-determined spots in neighbors' veranda in a kind of complaisant sort of way to prove myself to be a straight enough boy. Any aberration in the early 1950s, fortified by neighborly complaints, used to be taken seriously in the family; any grievance expressed by an older person was reckoned as a case reasonably proved, only the quantum of punishment had to be considered.

Normalcy returned, and I quit looking over my shoulders. On such a sunny day I found the owner's chatty doll-faced granddaughter managing their grocery store. I went in to buy a 'kaath mithaai' (pencil sized sticks of boiled and solidified molasses) that was the in-thing in those days. She informed me that all the boys had run down the road a while ago swinging catapults over their head. This meant there was a war-game on, and I had been left out.

I rushed down the road looking for them in the usual haunts. I found myself in a deserted patch of unfriendly territory between the graveyard and funeral pyre where boys did not venture out alone. My nemesis in the embodiment of a perhaps-15 or more looked me up and down several times before the approaching the subject.

“Do you know who I am?”

I really didn't. Somehow I felt my ignorance was perilous enough to jack up the nemesis' belligerency by a few notches.     

“My name is Aitu,” he volunteered, allowing a lingering smile that gradually hardened into a grimace.

I instinctively knew what was coming up, and I had hard decisions to make. No, I decided, I would not defend myself; that would enrage him even more. He was taller, muscular, and way up the ladder in terms of age; instead, my calling him 'daju' (elder brother) seemed to be pregnant with possibilities of launching a self-protection plan that must include a minimum of confusing lies. He did not seem to be a man with whom patience was a virtue.

“I had trouble with Aite, not you, you are Aitudaju,” I began. He stopped me short, stating, that precisely was the point. The problem apparently lay in the affinity between two names – Aite and Aitu.

“You bashed up Aite whom I do not even know, and boys all over the town are talking about me having been beaten up by a half- ‘Bongali’ (todays Bongs). “Why half?” I asked in amazement. The sunny answer came after a rain of 'fist-blows and boot kicks'. I even lost count of how many times I had been hit in the one-sided encounter.

My passivity coupled with freely rolling tears that had welled up in my eyes perhaps disgusted him. He peremptorily asked me to sit down, “Don't you understand that I have a name to protect!” “Sure daju,” I concurred. He selected a few leaves growing on the hillside, rubbed them on his palm, and applied the juicy salve on two particularly nasty looking bruises on my forehead. That was the beginning of a prolonged friendship.

The pain, the embarrassment, the unpleasant prospect of having to account for the bruises to friends and at home, all remained in the back of my head, as I ventured to reiterate my point, “But why am I only a half-‘Bongali’?”

“That is because ‘Bongalis’ are supposed to yap, yap and yap, kill the enemy by yapping. You come down to fisticuffs and lose half of your racial identity.” I decided to ignore even this unwholesome slur on my race lest he invited me to “dare to kill him yapping.”

Two generations down the line, Ishaan would have merited being 'full Bong plus' in Aitu's estimation. After his own fiasco, I had asked Ishaan to explain his conduct, and he retorted, “Your sugar coated blabbering with these silly girls is useless; you should have left the yapping to me.” 

** Bongalis – Bengalis are called “Bongalis” in Nepali

BY TAPAS MUKHERJEE 

Eternity -

http://royd-spiltmilk.blogspot.com/2011/01/lot-of-fun.html#more (A thread to Roy Durham's story)

Welcome Void followers – Don’t come too close to me as I am eternity, don’t touch me as you may melt and become me, don’t look at me for too long or you may get hypnotized, close your senses as I may just engulf you, devour you….

I was, once just like you – a traveler. I just happened to travel here and speak with Eternity. Eternity was not me at that time – he warned me just like I am warning you now. I didn’t listen and became a part of him forever. I thought I could outsmart him but I was wrong. Eternity is beyond you or who I was then. If you like your life, then don’t stay here too long – go on and choose a door. ESCAPE…

Here’s a hint – if you take the door in the middle it takes you to a cocktail going on in Paris somewhere. The door on your right leads you to the bloggers network and the only other one left leads you to a club… A club full of talented young people – They write poetry and add richness in all’s life, bloggers network is for the readers and the party is full of life. When you are done come back to me so I can put you at ease, release your pains and free you forever. All I need to do is touch you and you and me will be numb to suffering or joy. We will be here forever – for travelers to join. Eventually this void will be the end of all the laughter and all pain and we will be big enough to rescue the universe. I will wait ….

Check out the chapters of  Daisy Lemmas Riff Blog Chain  here:

Chapter One: Welcome to the Void
Chapter Two: Waking up.

Chapter Three: Eternity 

Chapter Four: Eternity 2

Chapter Five: Reality of a Dream
Chapter Six: Fragments

Chapter Seven: Dream or not it spoke to me 
Chapter Eight: The Bronze Elephant
Chapter Nine: A lot more Riff
Chapter Ten: Time Loop
Chapter Eleven: Elephant Graveyard
Chapter Twelve - Abyss 

Wishful (NOT) thinking

What Brought Me Here?

Here meaning where I am stationed in life right now. How did I land up here and where will I be in another 10 years? The latter being the most annoying question asked by an interviewer, as if to say where I am now should/must be temporary! And if I am satisfied with it, I am a loser!!! What is this quest of constantly wanting more? Don't get me wrong - I most certainly always want "more" but I just don't want it to be obvious to a stranger! 

Anyway, so I was this unassuming typical, nerdy, bespectacled, skinny girl, who had to fight off comments everyday from neighbors and friends about having "grasshopper" legs which reminded them of toothpicks! Now let me tell you that if I wasn't the subject of this absolutely unfeeling remark, I would have seen a lot of humor in it. But that wasn't to be. This was the stage in my life that saw a serious attention deficit in the social world! It was a stage where I constantly believed "You must really like me, cause you smiled at me." But I go too far with this one. 

After this never ending awkward phase got over, I found myself in college - with a group of gorgeous friends, a "to die for" boyfriend and myself not really unpopular. How that happened is a mystery - I think it had something to do with shunning the glasses and growing my hair. 

Career starts - I was in the capital city of India trying to meek out a living. Most of the time broke and angry! My meagerly salary allowed me to have just about two crazy nights in a nightclub/pub, after which I would survive on just bread till I got the next check. Basically from "check to check' was an understatement in my situation. A new term had to be coined exclusively to describe me; maybe something like the "corporate loser". 

Marriage - Just when my job and money situation took a jubilant turn, my husband (by then I was married) was moved to a town called Danbury, in CT. If one were to draw a graph of my career in Danbury, I think the excel sheet would give way and the software would need to be reinstalled, just to fit my life in. To make a long story short, from the first to the current year the pendulum swung from me feeling like a scumbag to feeling like an achiever. It took 7 years of my life for everything to fit. Any guesses what happens next??? We are MOVING AGAIN!! Yeah Marriage - sigh!

So there it is - my life in a nut shell for you to read - from "grasshopper" to a marketing specialist now. Do I feel achieved? That's an affirmative. Is there more achievement waiting? I don't know but I want more! What inspired (read provoked) me to write this post is a recent novel I read. A regular gossipy kind by Candace Bushnell – the kind which you wouldn’t dare admit to have read in a literary society, for the fear of being labeled. 

10 years hence - I want life to promote me from a consultant to a super business woman. I want to have already made enough money to last me a lifetime and will enough for posterity. But here's the thing - will that change me? I liked it when grasshopper finally became just Kriti. I like Kriti - I don't want her to go away like grasshopper did. I want everyone to love me even though I am sickeningly rich (like Annalisa Rice in the 5th Avenue) - a rare circumstance in this world according to Kiyosaki. 

Summer of 2022 - I walk into my husband's office and immediately recognize him, even though he is alien to whom I used to call my husband in 2011. He sits in a plush office directing people in the world and costing billions of dollars to governments and companies alike. Even the smell of his environment is unfamiliar - leather and cologne???? Common!!! I walk in, in my Chanel jeans (still not very happy to let go of the idea of "fashionable jeans"), Dolce and Gabbana bag, LV shirt and Prada stilettos. (My apologies to all if the above description does not speak money and fashion. These are just the brands I covet. I'll get there when I get there but in the meantime, I hope you know what I mean.)  I am still Kriti inside (but not out). My husband smiles a knowing smile, and then offers me his arm. We go out and meet all our friends from the past struggling years and have a genuine laugh over caviar and rare wine.  

50 years hence - I die a peaceful death, with a regret-less smile on my face, surrounded by friends, lovers and family alike. 

Back to 2011 – Post ends and I am being called a pathetic (unreasonable) dreamer by everyone who reads this entry.

    

My Dad's Diary

The flow of thought was steady in my head. In a few moments my sexagenarian life was in the  vortex of a dichotomy. But not for long. As I consciously agreed with the new import, all the notions  that I steadfastly clung to all my life about my existence stood nullified. The new impression imprinted itself dominantly, and changed me totally. In the wide memory-canvas I had etched many an episode of life spent in virtual futility; but now I am convinced that I am indeed a champ of some sort. And as the misty veil gradually lifted itself, I found myself swathed in a bliss I had never experienced before.

This was the day before I was to enter a hospital for a hip-joint replacement surgery, one of a series of complications that necessitated a major surgical intervention. “Entering the twilight zone,” was how I had always believed these to be, for even the attending medical personnel always avoided looking into my eyes while palpably lying about guaranteed favourable outcome, the understandable falsity somehow never creating a chasm in our relationship.

Would I see another sun rise? Was I leaving anything undone for my family? Would I like to see somebody for the last time? Immediately so many images surfaced, my mind automatically shuffling them into a panoramic collage, that I had to make an effort to pacify my thought processes, control myself.

And then it happened. As I closed my eyes in hopeless languor, the figure stood before me, but at a distance, against a backdrop of diffused light. I felt more than I convincingly saw that I was looking at a miniature version of myself, a midget of my own self, that appeared to be missing the outer covering of layers of skin. It was all muscles and veins and sinews, seemingly stark and supple at the same time.

In a moment I knew. That was the finer body inside my physical body. I remembered the Shastric dictum : the physical body – sthula sharira - is made up of gross elements; there is a finer body inside – sukshma sharira – made up of very fine invisible elements, tanmaatra(s). Seeing it is a rarest of rare experience.  

Aghast, I looked on. Then there was that surge of strange new thought wave, impelling but soothing, domineering but convincing; the inundation so complete that I ceased to be an existence on the surface of the ocean of life, but down under, groping but finding footholds everywhere.

Normalcy returned a while later. The first conscious thought that hit my head like a streak of lightning was that I was no longer standing on a quicksand in this world, I was on solid ground.    The next moment an inquiry cropped up in my mind. The whole process was bereft of any   assurance on whether I would survive the impending hospitalisation.

It is apt that I introduce myself properly. My name hardly matters. What matters most is how this existence has been tempered by the vicissitudes of cosmic interference time and again. I suffered bone fractures in both the legs at one go when I was about 10 years old, had shoulder bone dislocations 13 times between 14 and 50 years of age, underwent spinal surgery to extract a loose disc at age 20, and suffered a wrist fracture at age 53. Then came the time for hip joint replacement surgery at age 58. Subsequently, I underwent two hernia operations when I was 62 years old.

These earned me a rather dubious distinction in the form of a longish sobriquet in my friends' circle – 'Here is a man who breaks his bones on request'. They even wrote an epitaph – 'Here lies a Doctor's Delight.'

They have valid reasons too. For I also have a disease that chokes the nasal passages – vasomotor rhinitis – a name that one could almost fall in love with. I have pharyngitis in my throat, a heart palpitation causing tachycardia in the chest, a permanent and incurable cold and cough triggering allergy and I suffer from muscle cramps on and often, each time it seems that a tiger or a lion has an inexorable grip on me.

I consider myself to be an expert on pain management, but it has now become doubly difficult with osteoarthritis attacking both the thumbs, and that or something else choosing the neck and the elbows.

All the surgical interventions left me less and less competent than normal people. I am a lame person owing to leg fractures, a person with inadequate back strength due to spinal injury, diminished shoulder strength because of frequent dislocations. Inappropriate uses of anesthetics and sedatives and pain killers filled me up with kinds of problems that doctors have conveniently grouped under Allergy, nondescript ones. 

With these damaged resources I was determined to live as normal a life as was foreordained for me. It was a normalcy minus visiting temples or offering pujas or accepting prasada or read the scriptures. “Oh, the kind of stuff that happened to you; God saved your life,” elders sometimes uttered the heedless refrains. And I would retort back saying, “Yeah, He left me breathing and  took the life away,” causing consternation for the intended blasphemy. There was no end of raving and ranting out.

And then came the liberating influence of the Power within. As if a knowledge bank had exploded inside enabling me to view things differently, obdurateness as the intractable fort had crumpled, the threshold for understanding and acceptance raising itself on its on volition. The only aberration related to the unyielding inquiry – would I survive the next day.

It is needless to say that I did, but not without a sacrifice. The medical staff responsible for on- surgery care forgot to artificially water my eyes that was a must due to prolonged detention under anesthesia. The inevitable result was fissures on the walls of the retina that caused partial blindness in both eyes. 

Medical dereliction in fact had led to my lameness and my having collapsed during spinal surgery, and now partial blindness that the doctors explained away as old-age-degeneration; a degeneration that occurred overnight!! The hernia operations three years later maintained the dereliction record. Of the two hernias required to be tackled, the doctors forgot all about one. When it was detected a day after surgery, they carted me back to the operation theatre nonchalantly and repeated all the procedures to take care of the other, leaving a painful hardness in my stomach.

I have no rancour left in me now to keep condemning those responsible. Medical dereliction does occur; but how could it happen to me each and every time I was in the hospital? Was there a method in this madness? Or, a self-repeating design of the genius? I had to find an answer. I assigned myself the task particularly, now that I was heading for retirement from professional life. The Power within had successfully planted a seed that required careful nourishing. I knew I did not have much time left in this world for the task.

So, for the first time in years, I uttered a silent prayer – Lord, whether you are the ash smeared, trident carrying controller of the universe, the loving universal flute player, merciful Mother Shakti, benevolent preserver and protector of divine creation, please do not let me die an ignorant man.   

A friend had gifted the first four volumes of Swami Vivekananda's 'Complete Works' (now  available in 9 volumes) that mainly enumerates explanation and analysis of the Vedanta (Upanishads), both of his own and by other scholars. It is an attempt to introduce ways of practical application of the Vedanta in every day life; the ideas that took the world by storm towards the end of the 19^th century, the rumblings of which is heard even today.

With a life burdened with excruciating physical pain and mental agony I could never hitherto devote myself to reading those books. Impatience rooted in an innate revolt against anything believed to be holy and divine stood on the way of even casually reading, not to talk of assimilating the complicated details, anything even remotely connected with the Shastras.

Now I sat back and took a deep breath. What happened thereafter was a be-seizure by a force to reckon with. I had never found reading so beautiful, explanations of complicated aphorisms appearing with utmost clarity. Life was a play of gay abandon, of making constant adjustments between lower necessities and higher call, of an unceasing endeavour to mould oneself into more and more perfect instrument to emerge into one's own divinity.

What has that got to do with getting physically battered into a virtual pulp-mass? Battering has to be accepted with equanimity for I must be held responsible for the accumulated consequences of my own Karma. Birth after birth I need to work that out. Its a constant debit-credit account.  Besides, without endowing reward and punishment, this world will face a veritable chaos. Even I will not like to see my family, friends – near and dear ones – living in a disorderly world ruled by the tyrant's muscle power. That will tantamount to passing from the frying pan to fire.

There is a way out. Swami Vivekananda's prescription may appear tough and impracticable; but it is not when one has thought out the entire gamut of the issue. He wants us to plan the next life as we plan the next day, or the next week.   

Sri Aurobindo of Pondichery fame describes me most aptly in his legendary work – Synthesis of Yoga – when he outlines the profile of an average man: “To the ordinary man who lives upon his own waking surface, ignorant of the self's depths and vastnesses behind the veil, his psychological existence is fairly simple. A small but clamorous company of desires, some imperative intellectual and aesthetic cravings, some tastes, a few ruling or prominent ideas amid a great current of unconnected or ill-connected and mostly trivial thoughts, a number of more or less imperative vital needs, alternations of physical health and disease, a scattered and inconsequent succession of joys and griefs, frequent minor disturbances and vicissitudes and rarer strong searchings and upheavals of mind and body, and through it all Nature, partly with the aid of his thought and will, partly without or in spite of it, arranging these things in some rough practical fashion, some tolerable disorderly order, - this is the material of his existence. The average human being even now is in his inward existence as crude and undeveloped as was the bygone primitive man in his outward life.”

The two most damning stumbling blocks that the average man encounters from the first cry to the last whimper in this world are 'Ego and Desire'. Together they nastily pack a mean punch to create division and dissension among soul-mates. All beings and things are manifestations of That Illimitable One. We are the sparks of one Cosmic Soul, one Cosmic Consciousness. Whether we want it or not, whether we like it or not, we are all inexorably moving towards That Absolute Knowledge, That Absolute Existence, That Absolute Bliss - The Sachchidananda.

But what about the average man's mind? What about the feeling of pain and suffering, of being unhappy and miserable, of happiness and ecstasy, of a sense of belonging and rejection, of attraction and repulsion? The answer was simple.

The average man, being ignorant, equipped with a mind that reduced divine infinity into worldly finiteness in order to understand it with the help of his limited intelligence, mistakes the body carrying a name and a form as himself. He is in fact the Spirit, the Self, the Soul, with an  outer covering of the body. This costly mistake gives vent to a splurge of ego and desire. If you are the Soul, ego  and desire cease to have any impact on you.

But why should my average mind accept this as true? This is what Sri Aurobindo says on the subject: “Nothing can be taught to the mind which is not already concealed as potential knowledge in the  unfolding soul of the creature. So also all perfection of which the outer man is capable, is only a realizing of the eternal perfection of the spirit within him. We know the Divine to become the Divine, because we are That already in our secret nature. All teaching is a revealing, all becoming is an unfolding. Self-attainment is the secret; self-knowledge and an increasing consciousness are the means and the process.” It amounts to saying that the mind, on which we have no control, already knows this. And as soon as it feels that the man has stumbled upon the fact, it both acknowledges the fact and keeps on resisting it. That is precisely what has happened to me.

Isn't it somewhat difficult to believe that the Lord is waiting for the average man's yoga, his offering of union with Him, stationed as He is believed to be beyond in some unfathomable distance away?

Sri Aurobindo : “Life, not a remote silent high-uplifted ecstatic Beyond-Life alone, is the field of our yoga. The transformation of our superficial, narrow and fragmentary human way of thinking, seeing, feeling, and being into a deep wide spiritual consciousness and an integrated inner and outer existence and of our ordinary human living into the divine way of life must be its central purpose. The means towards this supreme end is a self-giving of all our nature to the Divine.”

Where to start?

Sri Aurobindo : “All must be done as a sacrifice, all activities must have the One Divine for their object and the heart of their meaning .. to express that One Divine in ideal forms, the One Divine in principles and forces, the One Divine in gods and men and creatures and objects.

“All life is consciously or subconsciously a yoga. Yoga is a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the secret potentialities latent in the being and – highest condition of victory in that effort – a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos. All life is also a vast Yoga of Nature who attempts in the conscious and the subconscious to realise her perfection in an ever-increasing expression of her yet unrealised potentialities and to unite herself with her own divine reality. In man, her thinker, she for the first time upon this Earth devises self-conscious means and willed arrangements of activity by which this great purpose may be more swiftly and puissantly attained. Yoga, as Swami Vivekananda has said, may be regarded as a means of compressing one's evolution into a single life or a few years or even a few months of bodily existence.

 “This is life's true object: growth, but a growth of the spirit in Nature, affirming and developing itself in mind, life and body; possession, but a possession by the Divine of the Divine in all things, and not of things for their own sake by the desire of the ego; enjoyment, but an enjoyment of the  Divine Ananda in the universe; battle and conquest and empire in the shape of a victorious conflict with the Powers of Darkness, an entire spiritual self-rule, and mastery over inward and outward Nature, a conquest by Knowledge, Love and Divine will over the domains of the Ignorance.”

Once taken in all seriousness the average man's Soul, known as the Annamoy Purusa (food sheathe), starts a ascending journey and emerges as Pranamoy Purusa (vital sheathe or mental soul) when he undergoes a sea change in his attitude to life. The next station for the Soul to conquer is the domain of Jnanamoy Purusha (knowledge soul), and then to Vijnanamoy Purusa and then to Anandamoy Purusa, the domain of the blissful Brahman, the Satchchidananda. On reaching this stage a soul finds itself as the Lord of the universe, not a spark or a part, but the whole of it.

It is said that a protoplasm takes eight to 11 million years of its soul's evolutionary process to emerge as a human being. There is no fixed time limit for humans to hit the divine high. If Swami  Vivekananda's words are  any pointer, it could take a life time, or a few years, or a few months, with the help of yoga.

Yoga has exacting rules which my battered body can no longer be subjected to. Still I am on to it as far as practicable under the circumstances. May be a few life times more for me. But I am on my way. Thank God for the battering on my body which gave me this unique turn towards liberation. Every time I am required to be sent back to this world, to the lap of Mother Shakti, God, batter my body harsher than before, but, pray, every time I must emerge as a more perfect instrument to “unveil the Godhead here, ihaiva,” as the Upanishad insists. 

Written by Tapas Mukherjee