first rains

The first memory of coming back is the rains. They came gushing in torrents, thick clumpish cascades rippling against the buffeting winds like billowing saris on the washline. They rushed along the sloping courtyard, washing away everything that came in their way; an eddy swirled and rippled at the corner where a granite slab lay an inch lower than the ridge dropping into the garden; the sound of them, on the tin roof shed across the garden, on the leaves, on the stone, on the flooded lawn and the drains in spate, on the sky-windows and the walls, dripping on buckets under leaking ceilings, the occasional rumble in the sky – relentless, unceasing, cathartic; filling and drowning every other sound, like the inside of a blowing conch shell. Colours burst in the gardens, the grey dust turned a deep brown, the leaves a livid green, redolent with the heavy tumescent fragrance of wet earth. I watched, fascinated and silent. It is this image – a room half-dark and lit from the outside, billowing white sheets of rain seen over a knot of fingers laced in the mesh of the rhomboid window jaali, and a steady drumming all around – that is my first memory of coming back to Lucknow. I had never seen a rain before.

what the

I don't own a television and just glance at the headlines on most days. But I know about Rakhi Sawant, of course. Tho' I have never seen her live - anywhere I think.

Somebody, tell me what the hell is this. Is there more of this shit going on in television? If so, I think I better buy a TV soon.

The Unspoken

Link

good morning

why does insomnia strike the sunday i have to get a million things done?

Truth about London Dreams

It has been widely reported that London Dreams is Rock on revisited. Nothing like that. The movie is a straight lift from The Comparative Study of Class Struggle in Eastern India in the 1870s and the rise of the Balban Movement in Ghaznavi in 1110 by KA Rizvi – especially the bibliographic bits.

The plot stays static but three characters revolve around it. Ajay Devgun plays a young RSS scholar searching for the relics of a lost civilization which he claims created the zombie disco-dance a couple of hundred years before the rest of the world. His belief in his own claims is fortified when he find what he is sure is a yellowing parchment with – Hello! – English script that he is sure belongs to this greatest of civilizations. But at the ASI institute, the scholars throw him out with the lie that the parchment was just a torn scrap from the TOI which had been subjected to disgusting nocturnal emissions around a year ago. Ajay picks up himself from the street he’s thrown on and brushes the dust off his coat – a gang of IronMaiden wannabes headbanging to “Betty bought a bit of butter… bitter” in the background underlining his bitterness all the more. Ajay swears to never wash the right side of his body till he gets his revenge.

In the meantime, Salman Khan is Ajay Devgun’s chawl neighbour, unknown to each other, but known to Amitabh Bachchan who makes a cameo at the end as a camel smoking Camel. Salman is in love with a hole on the east wall of his room for five years now but can’t muster the courage to confess his love. He orders take home chai and vada-pav one evening, lights an agarbatti and proposes to the hole finally one day. The hole remains silent and Salman interprets the silence as acceptance. In the first such scene between a wall and a man, or any inanimate object and a man for that matter, they make love that night – picturised to Kanchan’s mata bhajans and a Parindaesque blueness. As Salman enters the hole, he hears a sob and realises with a shock that the hole had been a virgin all along. But the sob actually comes from Ajay, his neighbour at the other end of the wall, who’s come back to his room realising that the bastards didn’t even return him his treasure – the parchment.

The two heros get eviction orders; the chawl is to be brought down to pave way for a pavement. Salman panics and approaches his neighbour, an inconsolable Ajay, to help take down the portion of the east wall with the hole in it. The two delicately saw off the portion and start lugging it away when, with a cry of “Joy Mukherjee!”, Ajay discovers another portion of the parchment under Salman’s bed and lunges towards it, dropping his end of the wall. The hole cracks, and becomes a hol-aa, and as Salman stares shell-shocked at the widened rift – he realises that the hole had been sleeping around in his absence. Anger follows this discovery of treachery and he wheels towards the man he is sure is the man who destroyed his love’s intact and tight virginity, Ajay. In the meantime, Ajay has also realised that he has been tricked, the parchment is HT and not TOI, and he wheels to face his nemesis also. (This part of the movie is sponspored by a blining Wheel neon seen from the open window separating the estranged heros right now.) The two heroes face eachother, fire in their eyes, their breaths angry snorts, bending and digging in for the final charge – when suddenly the door flies open and a bare breasted Asin rushes in with a banshee-like cry and buries each of their faces in her ampleness. (This part of the movie is never fully explained except that she is the daughter of the owner of the building, Asit Sen.)

And these are the first five minutes of the movie.

Thots

Success is doing what you want to do, most of the times.

Is it ok to steal the crutches in the jootaa-churaayee when the dulha is lame? If yes, where do they hide them? The traditonal mithai box is of course ruled out here.

Never kiss a gift horse in the mouth.

If they have a world record for the longest hair around the nipples, or in the armpits, I don't want to know it!

Before cutting the crap, do you have to blow out the candles first?

Tremors

I wrote about a horrible dream today I had had some months ago - the face of an old estranged friend, dead in the dream, and features screwed around a bullet entering the eye (I think I had seen a gruesome encounter picture in the papers that morning). Recalling that dream did not make it easy once I got up from my seat at around 1:45 AM in a silent and empty 3-bedroom flat. The fact that to enhance the imagery, I had been looking at images of people with their faces full of lead did not really help.

I collapsed on the bed, and realised that my hand, resting on a knee, was shaking. In fact, the bed was shaking. Some years ago, I had what can only be called a fit, a singular case, but I have never been sure of these things since. Something like sitting in a train and watching another move and the doubt whether it's us in motion (rather, the train we sit on) or the other train.

I pulled my jeans (an unfortunate habit I have if attacked by some monsters hiding under the bed) and stumbled outside. The building silent and eerie in its whitewashed emptiness. I touched the edge of the balcony facing the lift and felt the tremor again. Again, I was not sure.

I started climbing down the stairs, and found a couple standing with a child on the landing below my floor. The man, bare-chested, and wearing a vesthi or a pajama (I don't remember), started telling me about the dangers of using a staircase (so it was an earthquake!) and I walked back to my room, shutting three doors in between.

O, to see a face in these godforsaken empty hours.

Her heart as gold as mine is black, every time we speak, sometimes years in between, I end up twisting the barbs of my venom in it. Why do I do it? I ask, as always, the guilt long broken to a wearied self-loathing. Perhaps, 'coz she's the only one I have the power to hurt.

2 states and 1 UT

After a long time, I am reading - or rather trying to find some time. Every day, for half an hour, I read, aloud for most of the time, McEwan's Amsterdam and Banville's The Book of Evidence. It reminds me of Carlin's grandfather (I think), whom he spoke of, who wrote all of Shakespeare to savour him all the more.

It was McEwan's Atonement perhaps more than any other book which triggered my reading five years back. I have heard some people associate these novels with cold intellectualism but it is the bungling and erring human element which more than anything underlines them. Of all the mediums, literary fiction alone has the power to capture to the finest detail the almost invisible littleness of moods and whims, the stray kindnesses, the random cruelties, the imagined offences, the memories of beauty (I lift this phrase from Amsterdam) which make us more than the grand milestones of even the good (auto)biograpies.

Talking about books, apparently Chetan Bhagat is now onto his fourth novel - sure to stay on the top of the charts for a few months.

With the pace with which he is churning books (where does he find those eight hours?!) and the rate people are reading there would come a time when all the bookstores will only be filled with CBs and all the gRls and boyZ wLl b hnGng arNd thr, drooling from the end of their mouths. It will be a time when the show with the highest rating would be Rakhi Sawant picking her ass, Salman Khan's movies will be considered too arty and KJohar will be up for the Dada Saheb.

The synopsis for the book, 2 States, goes like:

Love marriages around the world are simple:
Boy loves girl. Girl loves boy.
They get married.

In India, there are a few more steps:
Boy loves Girl. Girl loves Boy.
Girl's family has to love boy. Boy's family has to love girl.
Girl's Family has to love Boy's Family. Boy's family has to love girl's family.
Girl and Boy still love each other. They get married.

Luckily I was wearing my shades as the flash of genius and wit nearly blinded me here.

Actually, there are still more steps, CB.

Girl's family runs a video store. Boy's family pierces nipples.

Girl's papa is a closet homosexual. Boy's mama is klepto.

Girl's papa rapes boy (in a Union Territory). Boy's mama steals the used condom.

Girl's family films the rape. Boy's father buys the video.

Girl's mama shags the boy's father as he watches the video. Boy's mama steals the VCR.

But...

Girl and Boy still love each other. They get married.

Though the girl insists on playing the male lead, using a strap-on dildo.

The novel ends in the evocative and romantic scene of their wedding night. The girl takes a woeful look at the ripped O of the boy (pictured poignantly as lying on his back and spreading his hairy legs, the red welts where the brute had gripped and pinned him still showing, for the girl), clucks her tongue and shakes her head; the beautiful mane the boy had first seen in the second chapter, and described as a mass of silk curtain ( another original CBian metaphor), bouncing lightly on her shoulders.

'Well', she reaches for the strap-on, 'I am sorry for what my father did to you.' Strap-on in place. 'You should have seen what he did to my Sanskrit tutor.' The girl edges to the bed and the boy, his eyes widening in horror brings his legs back together (too late!) and pleads in sobs. 'But know what -', the girl grips the boys legs and tears them apart, 'It is too beautiful a hole to let the turds have it alone.' The girl pushes and the boy howls.

And they lived happily ever after.

A treat

Yesterday, a colleague of mine got a promotion. I got to know of it in the evening when I caught up with him reading the letter.
A couple of years ago, this very person, a silent chap, had bought a car – his first I believe – and just like yesterday, I happened to be standing in the parking lot when he was taking the possession. I saw him take the possession awkwardly, an embarrassed rictus in reply to the effusive delivery person in the lookout for some baksheesh, and then walk away.
A couple of days later, I caught up with him and asked him if he’d celebrated that night.
‘No.’
‘Did you tell (I realized I didn’t know anything about his family or whether he lived with them) anyone?’
‘No.’

Yesterday, it was already late evening when I caught up with him. This guy is pretty senior and was actually working on a surprisingly junior role and hence the promotion was more like a correction.

‘So what are you planning to do?’
‘Nothing’, he shrugged.

Since he had to leave early, this time, I made him drive us to the nearby market and share a plate of momos.