A Day in the Life

Some time back a friend of mine asked me how come I do not write about day to day events in my blog, instead of my usual long anecdotal or uni-topical posts. At that time, as is usual in any conversation with me, I managed to escape with an ambiguous answer delivered with sufficient rhetoric backup to make it appear to carry weight. Now that I am about to go against my usual practice and write about a single day in my life, I am compelled to first try and answer his question to some degree of completeness.

A single day in reality is quite an arbitrary time unit. It is true that it appears quite natural, and is backed up by the sun and it's periodic appearances in our life, but as any amateur dabbler in relativity will tell you, time is really not a very absolute quantity, determined as it is by inertial reference frames, and irritating little scalars and vectors and four vectors and complex equations and light bouncing off surfaces and all the other paraphernalia with which physicists conduct their beloved thought experiments, and sometimes real experiments too with clocks flying around the Earth slowing down and what not. The point of all that pseudo-scientific nonsense( 'cause I really ain't too hot in relativity!) is that it is not really a viable option to try and regulate human life by such an artificial thing such as a day. Hence I try to portray a heartbeat, a moment, an instance, a frame of mind, an incident, for these are more natural to the human mind. A day can encompass many a mood, many an emotion, many an anecdote, many a thought about human existence, many a worthy blog post. But now that the challenge has been thrown down, respond I must. And respond I will.

This was a day in my life, as I lived it, as I remember it.

Ok, it would be quite wrong to call it a normal day, for Diwali never really is very normal, especially not for Bengalis, who have the pleasure of enjoying both Diwali and Kali Puja. For me, Kali Puja has, for the last five years, been associated with fasting all day. This should not be taken as an indication that I am masochistic( which I'm guessing most of us are to some extent) or deeply religious( which I am to some extent, but fasting doesn't have much to do with that). I have always loved Kali Puja, for it is quite different from all the other Pujas that we celebrate. The late timings, the incessant noise of firecrackers in the background, the image of the Goddess, with her dark colour and violent metaphors coupled with a sense of peace, the eternal contradictions between beauty and ugliness, reverence and terror, good and evil, have infused this festival, atleast for me, with a sense of romance and mystery. As a child, I remember watching my mother and grandmother fast all day, in order to be able to offer 'Pushpanjali' at night. I was then not allowed to fast, but as soon as I was allowed to, I immediately started a practice which has become one of the constant highpoints of my year, ever present, unmindful of all the other changes in my life. In recent times, the romance of the act has somewhat died, so now I continue the practice in order to try and relive the wonderful times I had, a sort of nostalgic portkey, taking me back to my childhood days.

And so, as Diwali dawned this year, I once again found myself riding upon this wave of nostalgia.

Ok, here goes. As is the norm on any holiday, I woke up late. But since this was one heck of a special holiday, I woke up especially late. Many a visitor came to my room, many a message was received by my cell phone, but to all I turned a sleepy ear. 11.30 came by, found me in bed, and departed with a disapproving shake of the seconds hand. But then, owing to a dichotomy between my alarm clock and cell phone clock, 11.30 came by again, and this time, to my utter surprise, found me awake. It was only when 11.30 had come along again( trichotomy ...wristwatch getting into the act) did I suddenly realize that I had gone to sleep at 12 the previous night, and had thus missed out, by half an hour, on another memorable half-a-day sleep, an event which has occurred only a handful of times in my recent past. But time could not be made to go back, and sleep had disappeared completely, and so I wearily switched on the computer, trying desperately to not insult my wing-mate who had by now come along to ask me if I was coming for lunch....

After a few summary checks of my blog( Boy! It sure has been a long time since I updated last), I decided to watch a Mrinal Sen movie that I had been trying to watch for half a month now, but had not been able to get past the first scene, as everytime I start it, some other work comes up, and the movie screening is deferred to a later date. On this day too the curse showed no signs of abating, and as soon as the credits had disappeared, there was heard the distinct sound of knocking upon my door.

Outside stood a red guy.

To be precise, The Red Guy.

Now such an occurrence is usually a signal for joyous celebrations, with flowing drinks and heaps of food. But in my present state( he he he, boy am I milking the fasting....), all I could do was let out tribal war cries, and welcome him in with low bows and red carpets. For the next two hours I listened with rapt attention as the Red Guy spoke about many a topic, ranging from Open Quiz organizational work to TPV printing hangups to Shamanth and his chronicles to dramatics to Godavari hostel to Joe Sat to Dire Straits to Thoreau to Freud to God to life to and fro to the moon and back......( somebody ssssstop meeeee!!!!)

Einstein( boy does he come up often in this post....!) had once tried to disprove the special theory of relativity by coming up with a paradox which went something like this-If you sit on a burning stove for one minute, it feels like an hour whereas if you sit with a Red Guy for one hour, it feels like a minute. And so, thanks to Einsteinian time scales, the minutes of my afternoon flew by, and soon I found that it was tea time. Deprived of both company( how long could he stay?) and coffee, I decided to give cinema another go. This time I was interrupted by a phone call from Amrut, in which he proceeded to loudly chomp his evening snack while simultaneously talking to me, a fact which soon cut the conversation short. For the next two hours I sat around reading books, listening to Ravi Shankar and his sitar, doing some Open Quiz research, removing cobwebs from my text books.......Outside, Taptians decided to hold something called a slow cycling contest, which turned out to be great fun to watch as one guy cycled at normal speed and completed the lap, while all others tried going slow, fell down and got disqualified!

Soon, Taptians got tired of slow cycling and turned their attention to fireworks. By now, I was feeling a bit odd, so I went off to have a bath. By the time I was done, it was 8, and having nothing better to do in life, I decided to set off for the Puja. I had hoped to get a lift to the gate, but soon all my hopes of doing so were shattered by the complete lack of people on the road, and I found myself facing a 3 km walk. By now I was feeling decidedly odd. Tagore suddenly started reciting in my ear-
"Jodi tor dak shune keu na aashe, tobe ekla cholo re"
If none heed your cry, then plough on alone, said Tagore. And with his words, my mind travelled back to those Diwalis I had spent in Kolkata, when we would all assemble in the pandal outside our house in the evening and listen to the bauls singing their songs. Songs of laughter, of gaiety, of dance and mirth, of spring and nature and the birds and trees and rivers of Bengal, of the omnipotent God who had created it all, not Ram, not Allah, for each held equal right over the lands of Bengal. No, the bauls sang of an abstract concept, a formless God. They were songs of love, and Tagore too had been inspired by them, and subsequently inspired them. As I walked along the forests of IIT-M, my mind watched a saffron clad baul, with his ektara, strumming away, dancing away, in a trancelike state, his voice rising over the gathered crowd, straight up to the God he sang for...

At the gate, my reverie was broken by the necessity of getting an auto. After much bargaining, and after absorbing the choicest Tam insults, I finally managed to convince one guy to take me along for the exorbitant sum of 35 bucks, something which I put down to as a Diwali bonus. As we travelled, I remembered how once we had gone mad trying to hire a cab in Delhi on Diwali night, and being informed by all taxi operators that there all their drivers were in an inebriated state. Thankfully, one old Ambassador was finally found, and we managed to reach the puja...

I too now found myself in a puja mandap. Outside a large group of people were sitting around and bursting crackers. The smoke and noise swirled around me, isolating me from all around. It penetrated into me consciousness. Smoke. Light. Noise. As I slowly lost my grip on the present, there arose from the haze visions of my past. As I bowed down before the idol, not one idol did I see, but a collage of the many Kali idols I had seen over the years, from the permanent idols at Dakshineshwar and Kalighat, to the Nabokali, the representations of the nine forms assumed by the Goddess, bringer of life, preserver of life, destroyer of life, all powerful, all pervading, as Shiva lay beneath her feet, on one hand-blessings, on the other-death. I remembered how once as a child I had given my entire saved up pocket money, a grand sum of Rs 50, to our local puja organizer, and how he had promised to use it for buying the saree offered to the Goddess, and how during the puja he had pointed out the saree to me, and a nameless thrill had run through my body, stemming from an innocent childlike belief that the Goddess would actually accept the offering. I had concentrated on the Goddess's eyelids all evening, for a sign that she was present, waiting to accept my gift, and how they had blinked...

A group of devotional singers now started singing some of Ramprasad's Shyamasangeet. These remarkable devotional songs had been an integral part of my childhood Kali Pujas. In the evenings, my father would bring out an old cassette of these songs, and we would listen to them, and then put it back, only to take them out next year, the flow of time, periodicity, devotion-all rolled into one 60 minute tape. They were remarkable songs, and I was always amazed by the familiarity which Ramprasad displayed while talking to Ma Kali. I always wished I could also meet her and be familiar with her...although I do not think I then had much to talk to her about. Perhaps I would admire her resemblance with her idols.....

I sat down at the back of the hall, and having nothing better to do, I started to observe the other people in the hall. There wasn't a big crowd, owing to the late timings. In front of me sat this seemingly autistic girl in a wheelchair, with her mother in the neighbouring seat. She appeared totally oblivious to all around, and was nodding her head to and fro repeatedly. A little way ahead of them, on the ground, sat this large group of people. The one among them who caught my attention first was this girl, who appeared to be a few years elder to me, sitting at the edge of the group. She appeared to have been sitting for a long time, and was obviously uncomfortable with sitting cross-legged for so long, as she kept shifting from one foot to the other, and soon gave up sitting cross legged all together. However, what drew my attention to her immediately was the fact that she was by a long way the most beautiful looking person in the room, nay, one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen. She was wearing a simple, white salwar kameez, and her hair was tied in a ponytail, the overall effect of which just took my breath away. At this point, Jibanananda Das suddenly started whispering Banalata Sen in my ear-
"Chul tar kabekar andhakar bidishar nisha,
Mukh tar Shrabastir karakarjo....."

It is very difficult for me to write this in a manner so as to properly express what I felt at the time. In any case, I am pretty sure that by now a large number of junta would have thought up smart ass comments to make about this. Thing is, what I wrote in the above paragraph would be a more or less accurate( although not well framed) description of my thoughts at that moment, but they may not necessarily be accurate in an absolute frame. I was by then feeling quite odd, and my brain was functioning at a heightened level. What was interesting, a fact that I noticed a few minutes later, was that I had recollected a Jibanananda Das poem at that moment, rather than a Salinger quotation or a Rosetti painting or some other expression of beauty that I would be more familiar with. I was reminded of Dr. Ramachandran and his lectures on synesthesia, for here I was recalling a poem which I hadn't heard for a long time,mainly because my brain had somehow made the connection to this poem due to the fact that she was a bengali, whereas, in any other case, I may have recollected something else.

Anyway, having nothing better to do, I watched her for sometime, wondering why she was performing this fast. Did she too want to recall her past Kali pujas, and memories of what she had left behind? I doubted it, considering her entire family was there, and appeared to be localites. Perhaps a sense of adventure then, or a challenge. Or maybe a thanksgiving, or a happiness, or even a sadness. Wordsworth now put in an appearance-
"Will no one tell me what she sings?
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow,
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago;
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of today?
Some natural sorrow, loss or pain,
That has been, and may be again."
Then all of a sudden I noticed something which diverted my attention from her.

To her left, a few feet away, sat this young boy, perhaps 5 to 6 years of age, looking very dapper in a shirt and trousers, and some manner of a jacket. He appeared to be either a cousin, or a family friend of the girl's, and was entertaining himself with what I believe is termed a 'cap gun', alternately shooting himself and a member of his family, and every time getting perturbed by the lack of sound, owing to the fact that the 'cap' had been removed as he was at the puja. He in particular seemed to enjoy playing with the girl, a fact not unusual considering she was the only one who, bored of the proceedings, was paying him any attention, making the necessary dying actions when required, and at other times trying very hard to make him come over and sit with her. Suddenly, in the midst of his game, the young fellow noticed the autistic girl, who was now making quite violent movements of her head, and was being pacified by her mother. As I watched on in wonder, his eyes widened as he for the first time noticed this girl. His gun, poised at his head in order to shoot him, was frozen in place. In fact his entire body had gone completely rigid. Only his eyes moved, taking in the entire site of the girl, and her rythmic nodding movements, and her mother trying to calm her. Then all of a sudden he turned his head to look at his playmate, who was at that moment talking to her mother. He looked at her for perhaps five seconds and then turned back to look at the other girl, and I could see the question bursting out from his wide open eyes, glowing with the innocence of childhood, as he beheld this great dichotomy, this great contradiction of life

I think at this point I started praying. For I could have gone and taken him on my lap, and somehow, in a simple manner, explained to him the basics of genetics, and DNA, and Mendel's theories, and of protein sequences, and the way they defined an individuals unique properties...and of mutations. I could have explained to him the basics of probability theory, and of random processes, and showed to him, in some manner, the fact that there was a probability of one in a million or one in a billion or whatever it was that a person could develop autistic tendencies. Perhaps I could apply the same laws and show him how his cousin, or whatever relation she was of his, was also a unique specimen( if I may use the word) of humanity, like a rare gem in a stone quarry, a great work of art amongst millions of mediocre efforts. All this I could show him, and answer his questions on them to some degree of satisfaction. But what of the questions I had no answer to? What if he asked me why the autistic girl, and no other person in the hall, was autistic. I could again babble about family trees and genetic inheritance, but what if he asked me what her cousin would experience, what her family would experience, having her in their midst? What if he asked me why all our brains were programmed to respond to the same stimuli in the same way, that all our conceptions of beauty were more or less alike, that for all of us 'a thing of beauty was a joy forever'? To all these I had no answers. So all I could do was pray. Pray that he not concern himself much with these questions. Pray that he not tax his brain too much to resolve this paradox. Pray that he not notice the third woman in this triangle, who was staring at him from behind, with her tongue sticking out, perhaps in mockery, or in disdain, at this site....

Someone now started singing one of Sandhya Mukherjee's devotional songs-
"Esho Maa Lakhi, bosho ghore"
(Come O Goddess Lakshmi, and rest in this abode of mine)
My mind went back to all the Lakshmi pujas I had seen at home, when my mother and grandmother used to work together and prepare the bhog, the sacred food offered to the Goddess, and how the purohit used to turn up at the allotted time and perform the puja. And I remembered one year when, for some reason unfathomable to me then, and perhaps still unfathomable, my grandmother and mother had quarreled, and my grandmother had refused to help in the preparations. And how I had in the evening, a little while before the puja started, suddenly remembered this song, hunted all over the place till I found it, and played it. As it played, its melody and words pervaded the unnatural silence that had settled over the house. And the word had penetrated into my grandmother's and mother's minds, and they forgot all about their arguments and again worked together on the preparations, and the puja had been conducted wonderfully. But the damage had been done. For I remembered a moment in the afternoon, when I had entered the puja room to carry out some errand, and looked at the idol, and she had looked back at me passively, and all of a sudden I was filled with this indescribable feeling. Not hate, not disgust, not distrust-no, none of these, for I was too much in awe of her to feel any negative emotion towards her. No, it was more like what Christ felt, when he cried out-
"Eloi, eloi, sabachtani?"
My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
Like the kid pondering the paradox of the two girls, I too had that day asked a question on life, and I had asked it to God himself, and no answer had been forthcoming. And I had shelved this question, with many others like them about life, one by one, till one day they would fill to overflowing....

By now the autistic girl had left, and so had the boy. The aarati had started, and I too moved forward to get a better glimpse of it. Again I looked into the idols eyes, like many times before, for some movement. None was forthcoming today. Then it was time for the pushpanjali. I noticed the other girl too was giving it, and seemed quite excited about it, impatiently waiting to be given the flowers. Then, in a few minutes it was all over, and we all headed off to collect the bhog. The heavenly taste of khichri and payesh, at 1 in the night, after fasting for over 24 hours is indescribable, certainly for me, in all probabilities for most other people...

As I walked away from the puja, my mind went back to my childhood again, those idyllic days in Kolkata, then the shift to Delhi, and the pujas I had enjoyed there, with my entire family, my parents, grandmother, uncle, aunt, sister, away from my homeland, yet at home. And all the time those shelves were filling up waiting to burst. And I remembered the day of my counselling, when a voice had told me to get out. To get out from the context, the life I had led till now, and go elsewhere for answers. And I had. And those shelves had kept filling. And the voice had acquired a name for itself...

And I felt alone. As I went towards my friends house, I felt alone and cut off like I never had before. Cut off from my past, my heritage, my culture, my birthplace. Jibanananda now started off again-
"Abar ashibo fire dhanshiritir teere - ei Banglai"
(I shall return once more...)

I will return one day, when I have settled all my shelves, answered all my voices. I will return, like Jibanananda before me, to the banks of the many rivers which wash my land. I will return to that city that saw me enter this world, and was like a mother to me for a large part of my life, which still calls out to me, across the mists of time, across the wide expanses that separate her from me, asking me to return. I will return again to the setting of my childhood, and claim what is left of it. I will return-to Bengal.

On the 11th of November, 2004, this was how I lived my life.

Owing to the wonderful thing called memory, I can live that day long after it has passed.

Owing to this wonderful thing called The Raven's Desk, I can live that day...forever.