Family Photograph

I came across this photograph yesterday (click for a larger view). The elderly man in the centre, wearing a white turban, is R's great-grandfather, Chatrabuj Gandhi. R is not sure about the rest, but one of the young men standing behind him must be R's grandfather Dwarkadas; Dwarkadas's oldest son, Mangaldas, R's father, is probably one of the small boys.

It doesn't matter if none of these people are actually in the photograph -- they could all be complete strangers. What I thought when I studied their faces was that these people, like us, were all starring in their own internal stories, even as they sat for the photographer; I imagine that they were all convinced that they were exceptional and significant in the universe. And of course, for all intents and purposes they have all vanished without leaving much of a trace: a faded photograph, some DNA, maybe a house one or two of them built, which still stands in the village.

I know all this, and yet part of me is still convinced most of the time that I'm the star of the play, and that I will never die.

(Actually, the very first thing I thought was about styles of headgear: the elders are wearing turbans; the younger generation, round caps. In more recent pictures of R's father and uncles, they are all wearing white caps shaped roughly like an upturned canoe; and the younger generations have abandoned headwear altogether. And -- oh yes -- where are the women? They didn't observe purdah, and the girl children are included. Were they standing to the side, observing the occasion, or preparing the after-photograph lunch? I bet they were all starring in their own stories nonetheless.)

Luxury Rooms Available

We discovered another coffee place today -- Coffee World on LB Road, next to the flyover, in Adyar. It is pleasant, but its gigantic windows look out on an ugly view.

I did have a chance to speculate on who the occupants of the luxury rooms might be; travelling salesmen of small items, perhaps, carrying samples in worn molded-plastic briefcases, perspiring in the summer heat. The small reception area would contain one man dozing or reading the newspaper under a dirty ceiling fan, and perhaps a small boy, ready to run errands or bring cold drinks - served in the bottle, with a straw. At the end of the day the guests would return from meetings, bathe from a bucket of cool water, change out of shirts and trousers into more relaxed lungi and undershirt, and lie down for a while, before deciding what to do with the evening.

Postcard Vendor, Golconda

Photograph by Ramesh Gandhi

We recently came back from spending a week in Hyderabad. We hardly got out, but did manage to see Golconda Fort and the Qutb Shahi tombs. I had seen the fort many years ago, and had a vague image in my mind of a vast expanse of strewn boulders and cut stones -- but it wasn't like that; it's a ruined but still beautiful hill fort, one of many in India. Golconda was fabulously wealthy, in large part because it is said to have been the ancient world's only known source of diamonds (including the Kohinoor and the Hope diamonds). Here's the wikipedia entry on Golconda, which includes a list of other Indian forts.

As we walked out of the gateway this man approached me with his envelopes of postcards in the crook of his arm. I was holding my camera; I gestured with it and said, "See, I have my camera. I've taken so many pictures, I don't need any postcards." He replied very mildly, "But you may not have these angles; just take a look." By this time R and our friend had emerged. I asked R if he would take the man's photograph. R said, "She would like to take your picture, is that all right?" He said politely, "If Sahib will stand beside me." But he stood against a wall of the fort, and R composed it so beautifully, with the angles of the envelopes and the (modern) stairs. And we bought two sets of photographs, and parted cordially.


Here are some photographs which I took of Golconda, at Flickr.

Blogday and stuff

under the fire star was four years old yesterday. Appropriately, I missed it....

Just to mention a couple of other blogs I've encountered recently:

Parayil A. Tharakan Blog may not have the most catchy name, but it's worth looking at. It is full of stories and pictures from a Kerala which must largely exist only in memory.

I just came across this one today: India outside my window -- another expatriate, in the not-far-away Southern city of Bangalore.

Abida

Abida Parveen, a Sufi singer from Pakistan, has a big, powerful voice. Because of this voice, and the passion with which she sings, and also because of her remarkable (big, powerful) physical presence, she has become instantly recognisable in India and Pakistan. Sometimes I find her overwhelming, as I did another singer in the same tradition, the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. But recently a friend gave us a CD of Abida Parveen singing songs of Hazrat Shah Hussain, which are more melodious than some of the work in this genre. I quickly became hooked to one of them, Raanjhan. I've been listening to it every day, and every day it has the same mesmerizing effect on me.

I've uploaded it as an MP3 here. I'll keep it up for a week or so. It's a big file -- 10.9 MB -- so if you don't have a fast connection you can listen to a streaming version of it at musicindiaonline.com. If you like it, you can hear the rest of the CD at the same site here. Do listen to it, and tell me how you reacted to it.

I found an article in the Pakistani newspaper Jang about the annual festival at Shah Hussain's tomb in Lahore. It's vividly written, and includes information about Shah Hussain (1538-1599), who must have been quite a character.

Science Exhibition, 1965

Hitchhiker

I recently finished reading Vinod Joseph's first novel, Hitchhiker, published by Books for Change, Bangalore. Its protagonist is Ebenezer, a young man from a family of Dalits (once known as Untouchables) who have converted to Christianity in the hope of shedding the stigma of their low caste. He wants to get an education that will enable him to leave behind the suffocation of lowest social status in a small town. The novel sees him through a series of trials (including re-conversion to Hinduism) which leave his future very uncertain.

I stuck with this book in spite of the depressing course of Ebenezer's life because the book appeared to be such an accurate reflection of life in a village in Tamil Nadu, far from the big city where I live; and of the outside world at the time that the action is going on. It's full of tiny details about the local church, the way people eat, the things they must do to try to get ahead. I felt the heat, the sweat on my forehead, smelled the food and its oil on my fingers at these points in the story.

The book talks (at too much cost to the flow of the story, I'm afraid) about caste politics in Tamil Nadu, about the IT sector, about high caste violence against low caste. I found much of it to be told as if from a distance -- a scene of rape, for example, seemed narrated as if it were obligatory, without getting me into the head of the victims. In the end I read the book as a document of a part of life here of which I've heard, but with which I have had no direct contact.

I think the author will be able to expand and grow as a storyteller when he less less of a social burden to carry; but this book can be read as what seems to me to be an accurate picture of a particular life which could hardly be farther away from those of most of its readers.

There's an interview with Joseph on The Great Indian Mutiny.

A Prison Evening

I was looking for a transliteration of an Urdu poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and found it; but then I found this also, and it was amazingly beautiful -- from The Wondering Minstrels :

A Prison Evening

Each star a rung,
night comes down the spiral
staircase of the evening.
The breeze passes by so very close
as if someone just happened to speak of love.
In the courtyard,
the trees are absorbed refugees
embroidering maps of return on the sky.
On the roof,
the moon - lovingly, generously -
is turning the stars
into a dust of sheen.
From every corner, dark-green shadows,
in ripples, come towards me.

At any moment they may break over me,
like the waves of pain each time I remember
this separation from my lover.

This thought keeps consoling me:
though tyrants may command that lamps be smashed
in rooms where lovers are destined to meet,
they cannot snuff out the moon, so today,
nor tomorrow, no tyranny will succeed,
no poison of torture make me bitter,
if just one evening in prison
can be so strangely sweet,
if just one moment anywhere on this earth.


-- Faiz Ahmed Faiz (translated from Urdu by Agha Shahid Ali)

(The beauty and clarity of this translation became even more apparent when I compared it to the one by Shiv K. Kumar in my copy of Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, which begins: "From the sinuous pathways of evening stars / the night climbs down, step by step...")

Read about Faiz (1911-1984) in the Wikipedia.

In Mahabalipuram

The sand under our feet - me and my friend P - as we walked toward the shore temple. Fishing boats drawn up on the beach. One or two traditional silver-grey catamarans, trunks of worn wood lashed together; the rest modern boats; some with the names of relief agencies on the sides, given after the tsunami. The tide was coming in, it kept washing up to my knees. We would move higher up, then come down to feel the water swirling around our feet. Then it would rise up again, and we would move back, so that we seemed to be staggering drunkenly, laughing. The way people customarily walk on a beach, in fact.

At lunch: A lobster was on display, along with a grouper, a snapper and a hoomoor (?), laid out on small round white stones. The lobster was beautiful; ornately stippled, striped and decorated, dark brownish/greenish, a baroque jeweller's decoration for a wealthy dining table.

The red snapper was more bony than I had expected, its flesh came away in soft flakes. A wafer of chocolate mint afterward, wrapped in gold foil and encased in a hexagonal black paper box. Sula white wine.

Afterwards we lay in string hammocks tied to palm trees. I photographed my feet crossed on the tapering end of netted cotton rope, the long fronded leaves spreading above me. The breeze was strong enough to sway me from side to side, and I found myself humming Rockaby Baby, not part of my usual repertoire.

It was one of those precious days, on the cusp between cool and hot seasons, between land and sea, time out from ordinary time.

A Saffron Umbrella

I was feeling aimless, discontented. I was babbling. I said, "I need a designer. I need a personal trainer. I need a guru. I need Sai Baba and his saffron umbrella." He was in town yesterday, we had driven by chance past a place where he was walking among a group of gawkers and devotees, blocking traffic and crowding around him so that we could see nothing but the slowly-moving top of his umbrella.

R said, "You don't need Sai Baba - all you need is a saffron umbrella. It would shade you from the sun, and you would be fine." We laughed at the absurd image, and I felt much better.

[my remarks] "out of proportion blow kiya hai"

Hema Malini said this, trying damage control after saying that North Indians who have a hard time in Mumbai should go back where they came from. I posted it because it's a wonderful example of Hindi-English. At the same time, my mouth really fell open when she made the first statment; some years back, South Indians, of which she is one, had a very hard time in Mumbai, thanks to anti-outsider campaigns by the Shiv Sena political party. I want to say 'what was she thinking?' but I think I already know the answer: nothing at all.

Christmas Eve and MGR

Here's something different: an MGR fan-blog. MGR, an extremely popular filmstar and then politician, died on Christmas Eve, 1987. I found this passage from the blog especially interesing:

[someone said that] when MGR fell sick in 1984, he was rushed to Brooklyn Hospital in United States. There he died, but he was fitted with machines and the control was given to MGR's wife Mrs.Janaki Ramachandran, and she controlled, the button is not mechanical one it is in a form of medicine (tablets).

...

One day (23.12.1987 night) MGR's wife has administered the wrong drug and the machine ceased to function and it was reported that MGR was dead. ...

As it happens, I was working at the American Consulate in Chennai when MGR died. I've posted my memories of that time on Chennai Metroblogging. Here's the text: M. G. Ramachandran, known as MGR, died on Christmas Eve, 1987. He had been an extremely popular filmstar, and then politician; he was Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu when he died. He was elderly and his health had been failing for some time, but his death caused an enormous outpouring of emotion in Tamil Nadu. I was working at the American Consulate in Chennai at that time. Early in the morning on Christmas Eve, the Consul General (CG) called me and said that he had heard that MGR had died. He said that I should try to get in to the office as soon as possible, because we were afraid that there might be some kind of unrest in the city. I was able to drive in from my house in Rutland Gate because it was still early. Later, as more people heard the news, people in cars were driven back; cyclists were forced to get down and walk, as a sign of ‘respect.’ As it happened, I had the Consulate building almost to myself. A few people had come walking, or had arrived very early; the rest stayed home. My office was on a level with the Gemini flyover – at the time the only flyover (overpass) in Chennai, and a central route to Rajaji Hall, where MGR’s body was taken to lie in state. As the day progressed, more and more people began crossing the flyover on foot, walking downtown. Soon they were a solid mass; people were coming in to Chennai from outlying towns and villages, to see MGR. I spent much of the day taking phone calls and just staring at the people streaming by. Some of them were crying, no doubt, but as the crowd grew and grew there was and air of excitement, as though they felt their own strength, and wondered what would happen next. Every once in awhile, someone would stop and throw a stone at the Consulate. One hit one of my office windows, and left a spider web of cracks in the bullet-proof glass. In the afternoon, someone jumped over the wall – which had just been raised in a security upgrade, though it had not yet become the fortress that it is today – and smashed the glass on each side of the Consulate’s main door. Then he ran back and over the wall and was gone. There was some looting of shops – I could see from my window a petrol bunk being broken into, and people making off with cans of engine oil and such; some cars, I heard later, were damaged; there was violence throughout the state, and many people committed suicide; but what I saw was just the huge, unimaginable mass of people, all headed in one direction. On the day of MGR’s funeral, I drove out with a black dupatta tied to my windshield wiper as a sign of mourning, and picked up a large floral wreath. I was nervous about it, but no one stopped me. I went to the CG’s house, where a police escort was supposed to take us to Rajaji Hall. No one turned up, however, so we decided to go alone. We put the wreath prominently in the front seat beside the driver, and set off on our own down the beach road. The road was completely jammed. The size of the crowd was unimaginable – hundreds of thousands of people. The driver had to inch along. People peered in, saw us foreigners and the wreath, and parted to let us pass. None of us spoke a word – it was like driving through a tunnel made of living human beings, of whose intentions we were unsure. Eventually we reached the place, later than we had intended, because of the non-existent police escort. By this time MGR’s body had already been removed and placed on a gun-carriage (I think that’s what it was), where he would be taken in procession through the streets, before being buried in a hastily constructed tomb on the beach. We carried the wreath to the carriage, handed it up to someone who placed it on MGR’s body, and stepped back. Then we drove back through those thousands of people; I went home and watched the rest of it on television. If you have seen Mani Ratnam’s film Iruvar, which tells a story based in part on MGR’s life, there is a scene at the end, where the main character’s body is taken on a carriage through huge crowds. That scene looked very real: it brought the day back to me. It was an unforgettable experience.

Flying

We flew from Chennai to Coimbatore. Most of Tamil Nadu is red and flat; then giant rocks or very small mountains rise suddenly from the plains. This view from the plane window, of rocky hills above thin cloud looked like the mountains of heaven:



The main road to Coonoor was closed for more than a month: landslides because of heavy rains. It had just re-opened the day before we drove up, but no heavy vehicles were allowed, since roadwork was still going on. The road was almost empty. In many places, raw red earth slides looked as if it would take very little to set them moving again.

A picture from the hotel:





More of my photos of Coonoor on Flickr. (and still more to come)

burnblue.com sketchbook:

From November 15, 2004 to June 8, 2005 I travelled through many countries, read 34 books, got sick 3 times, got robbed 2 times, and learned more about myself and this world than i thought possible. This sketchbook records those 7 months in images.

Sketches of Thailand, India, Africa, Europe. Most of it could be anywhere, but I kind of like the idea of a travel sketchbook that doesn't have anything picturesque about it. Once in a while.

Heatiness

My brother-in-law sent us an email, purporting to have been written by a doctor in Mumbai - one of those emails which gets forwarded from one person to another - and claiming that the juice of papaya leaves is helpful in treating dengue fever. Whether it's true or not, here is the rationale:

It's believed one's body would be overheated when one is down with dengue and that also caused the patient to have fever. Papaya juice has cooling effect. Thus, it helps to reduce the heatiness in one's body, thus the fever will go away. I found that it's also good when one is having sore throat or suffering from heatiness.

I've always been interested in traditional Indian medicine's idea that some things are heating, and some cooling, and that an imbalance between the two causes illness. For instance, mangoes are hot. If you gorge on mangoes and get diarrhoea, it is because you have overheated your system. Some foods are obvious: chillies, onions, garlic are hot, yoghurt is cooling. Others, like the mangoes, are not so obvious, at least to me.

I never knew what to call the condition of heat overload, and now I do: 'heatiness.' I think this is a great word, with many applications. In this fast-paced world of ours, there is altogether too much heatiness; and papaya leaf juice, yoghurt or any other cooling substance is certainly worth trying, to get the temperature down.

A Day of Death

It’s All Soul’s Day today – for Roman Catholics, at least; not for my cook, Mary, who’s evangelical. I drove past the Quibble Island Cemetery today (which was an island in the Adyar river delta once, but is so no more, thanks to all the development in recent years) and saw that the gates had been thrown open, and that flower vendors had lined up on either side, selling garlands of yellow marigolds. A steady stream of people walked through the gate, garlands in hand, to visit their dead. A loudspeaker is blaring out hymns.


When it rains heavily in Chennai, as it did last week, and the soil becomes soft and loose with water, big roadside trees topple over. In our own garden, three eucalyptus trees – twenty years old and at least 55 feet tall - began to lean over our neighbour’s wall, breaking it in one place and threatening to crash down on their roof.

Today we brought seven men in to cut the trees down. We feel terrible about it; R and I both cried when the first tree fell. (Mary was practical: she said, "Such big, thick trees -- we'll get good money for them.")

The men worked so hard all day long – small men all muscle and bone, wearing tucked up plaid lungis, shirtless, barefooted; and with only a long rope, a two-man handsaw and some machetes for equipment. In between feeling unhappy and worrying about whether the job could be done with no damage to the neighbour’s property or ours (ten clay tiles smashed on our side, and a number of smaller plants and branches of remaining trees crushed and broken), I was full of admiration for their industry and skill. But it feels like a day of death, all right.

NaNoWriMo 2006

Getting ready for NaNoWriMo, I have gleaned a couple of references to free programs / gizmos for writers. There are lots more, which you can find by browsing the Nanowrimo forums. Go and sign up -- the time to write your novel has come!

Papel - 'the intuitive tool for creative writers'. I just started to use it, and it's wonderful. I've made one 'papel' for my novel, and another one as a kind of idea dump - for blog, poetry, short story ideas. It has a desktop with text documents which can be moved around, as in mind-mapping - for scenes, characters, notes, or whatever you want.

A cute pocket storyboarder.

Noisy Keyboard makes your keyboard sound like an electric typewriter. Turn it on or off, according to your mood.

As to my novel, I've decided to have fun, and not to worry about being intelligent, or about who might read over my shoulder and sneer at me. Maybe I'll actually finish this year.

Lightning

A terrific thunderstorm last night. I saw a bright flash, as if a light bulb had exploded, and glass flying and clinking on the floor. A window had blown out. I photographed it as if I were a reporter at a crime scene, and tried to sweep up the shards. (In the morning Lakshmi found more, 15 feet from the window.)

I looked out the door where the watchman was sheltering in the porch, and said, "What was that?" He said, "Minnal" - lightning. "Is that so?" I nodded, and went back inside.

Still Here

I’ve been so down about the image-less state of this blog – and by extension, the fragility and futility of the world, etc. etc., that I was on the verge of chucking it. The blog, that is. Then R persuaded me not to.

I was driving through driving rain today: it’s been going on for several days now; parts of the city are flooded, and everything is a soggy mess. I was listening to Ernst Bacon’s Remembering Ansel Adams, for clarinet and orchestra, and it became apparent that the inside and outside of the car occupied parallel but completely different universes. It was a dangerous illusion, given the need of the driver (me) to pay close attention to the splashings and swervings; but so pleasant, being cocooned in cool and meditative sound.

Beyond that, life goes on in its usual soggy and messy way. We saw a very good film, Indian but mostly in English: Being Cyrus, with a good cast, and excellent acting by Saif Ali Khan. Divali, the festival of lights, came and went, with some squibs dampened by rain, but enough remaining to create a continuous wall of noise from morning to night. Oh, and I painted a shell that I like. That’s about it.


My husband's take on the same shell.

Coconuts and Poochis 2

Back in March I wrote about how we had applied a medicinal poultice to the crowns of our three coconut trees, because insects were spoiling the young coconuts. And whether because of our efforts or not, the next crop was superior. Now our newish gardener has declared that the coconuts need another dose. He's from the countryside and knows farming - certainly our garden has never looked better - so we have obeyed. In addition to what we had applied in March: rock salt, mothballs, sambrani (a kind of incense), turmeric, and edible camphor (used here in some sweets), we have now added asafoetida and a fragrant bark called (I think) vaasambu. Lakshmi, Ethiraj the gardener, and a coconut-tree climber worked to pound the ingredients between two stones in the ugliest part of our house, the area behind the kitchen:


The coconut-tree climber has an interesting looking container hanging from his belt to hold his machete. the rope over his shoulder is his climbing sling. He wrapped the pink cloth around his head to make an informal turban, shinnied up the trees, cut off excess leaves (how does one determine this, I wonder?), cleaned the crowns, applied the poultice and shinnied back down again. Now let's see.