Pencil shavings and paper

The words on the tiny paper seemed to dance to the beat of silence in the room. Fidgeting with the apsara black pencil, her tiny hands burst into a cold sweat. The pencil slipped out, falling onto the mosaic tiles, disturbing the silence. A pair of reprimanding eyes stared at her squarely from the table in the center of the room. She reached for the tiny piece of paper which had been passed on to her, like a fistful of pencil shavings. He had clamped it into her hand. Now, she hastily crumpled it up and slipped it into her pocket. She did not want any roving pair of eyes to stealthily read her little secret. Worry turned into anger. Anger turned into incomprehension. She turned silent.
They behaved like six year olds.

The poor paper was torn into tiny pieces and thrown away with a fistful of pencil shavings. Rubbish-ed.

Pencils gave way to pens and time to memories.

Memories revisited as old acquaintances accidentally met. They spoke of the rooms, the pencils and the people. They talked of how different life is now. They suddenly remembered the paper. Trepid laughter on both ends drowned the awkward silence of the in between years.

They rubbish-ed it once again, as something only six year olds would have done.

After all, the first time he asked her the question they were only six.

the 8:05 fast

I plug my ears to drown the din of
the bhajjiwalimachiwaliearringwalabhelwalipasscoverwalabutterchakliwali
the blind old man singing for alms,
the grumbling fourth seat passenger trying to squeeze her butt in
the lady whose toe just got pulverized under a fashionwali's high heel sandal
the college girls' parroting
the office women gossiping
the house wife bickering
the mother-in-law nagging
the metallic clatter of the tracks
the noises inside my own head
discordant, many,chaotic.
On board the 8:05 fast

I like to do magic

"I had draw this picture because "I like to do magic"



Bhuneshwar doesn't like to sit in one place. He doesn't like to listen to stories.
He dislikes it when I tell him 'you could read this book.'
While the rest of the class was eagerly scribbling away, he just shifted from one place to another...clueless. After a little cajoling I managed to get him to bring his pencil to the paper.
At the end of class he handed me this...a piece of paper, with its lower edge folded.
When I open the flap I see the complete picture...It certainly is magical :)
He is just 10.

His story

He only wanted a story

that would make life a little more liveable, in a city

which could be packed into a match box.

He looks for a new one every tuesday,

among the rusted steel racks stacked with

the smell of yellow secondhand pages.

The noise on the first floor

I first walked into the school, early on a Monday morning. The school building looked like any other BMC school in Mumbai, save for the innumerable pigeons that greeted me with an infectious flutter at the gate. This school building houses BMC schools in four different mediums of instruction: Marathi, Telugu, Gujarati and English. The first floor houses the English medium initiative undertaken by an NGO that educates community children from the surrounding chawls and bastis.

It was still early when I reached and children were only trickling in to their classrooms. As I walked down the corridor, I was met with warm smiles from women busily going about with brooms, books or stationery in their hands. Slowly, I heard music flowing out of different classrooms. The same women were now in the classrooms, cheerfully welcoming each child as he or she walked in, all set for a new day at school. I was stunned for a few moments as I remembered my own days in school. We were herded into classrooms and quickly silenced as soon as the bell rang. Then we waited for the teacher to make her entry so we could welcome her with our “good morning teacher” in a rising crescendo.

Almost a decade later, here I was faced with the possibility of an entirely new equation between teacher and pupil.

The first floor at this school is never for a moment enveloped by the piercing silence typical to most ‘good’ schools in the country. It is always bursting with curious voices of enquiry. Today, almost eight months later, as I work with the children on the first floor, I rarely miss the silence that my school was enveloped in, always.

D,

We've had a summer ritual which we unknowingly observed for the last three years with (almost) religious piety. The gulmohar tree outside the window had burst into a fiery orange. Yesterday the first rains reluctantly trickled down the city and doused the flames of the forest.The sholay of May will soon drop into a puddle of rain water and our summer rite still remains incomplete.

We missed the nine buck train ride for a warm, sunny lunch washed down with cold lemon iced tea, laced with conversations. We've also foregone the ritualistic pattern of scourging our brains and every city guide for a 'new' place to eat at, only to ultimately find ourselves (for the nth time) in our good old favorite joint.

Its pouring in all its splendour now and I can hear a distant rumble of thunder. I will miss hearing you go shrill over the joy that the rain brings you, interjected only by your mutter of how you dislike your feet getting wet. :)

As I tip toe over keechad and jump over potholes, I'll think of you with your long umbrella and your dad's raincoat. Another summer passes by and the city will be washed clean yet again. I hope you won't miss seeing our city soaked to the bone, too much. There will be more scorching summers with renewed rites and rains. Till then I'll drink a glass of deep purple kaala khatta to you, just for old times' sake.

Of that which my Nikon didn't capture.

His stately moustache seemed to fan out as his pleasant face creased into a smile when I appreciated his taste of music, safely tucked away in his glove compartment. He didn't speak much, but conveyed a sense of happy camaraderie to his co-passengers. After trekking in the Himachal for almost a week, with no mode of conveyance but feet, sitting in a jeep felt surreal and luxurious.

My stay in Solang was drawing to a close and I was doing my best to lap up everything I saw and sensed around me, and lock it all into some crevice of my head. The first two days had been reserved for acclimatization walks around our camp site. Trudging over huge stones, crossing over gushing rivers and gingerly walking a narrow, winding trail, had been anything but easy.

A foot slipped, a hand extended, a sun burn, some more sun block splattered.

A loose stone in the river bed...PLOP! Into the ice cold water! The sock irredeemably wet.

Panting up steep gradients. Power-stops only for sips of water and some more sun block.

Having acquired requisite 'trekking skills,' by day three, we found ourselves at the base camp in Dhundi. At the end of a six hour long trek, we found ourselves at a lovely tented camp site on the banks of the Beas. Bereft of most things that define my consumerist status, (cell phone, my i-pod, television) I didn't feel alone and bored. Life suddenly seemed to be brimming with little. I sincerely felt happy. There is a joy in less.

As the jeep glided down the narrow roads of Solang, with my moustached friend waving one hand to every other passer-by and using the other to deftly steer his vehicle, I wished I could make a mental imprint of everything to the last detail; the mountains, the green, the colorful people, the thin weightless air, the children in white and blue, the wild goats, the cane baskets, the smell of weed, the foot prints in snow, the blue sky, the white stone beds, the steaming hot momos, the quaint bridges, the arduous yet joyful treks, the hot mornings, the sweet tea, the cold nights, the soft tripping feet of the river....

There is a lot that my Nikon did not capture. But they remain...in some crevice.

"And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued." - Pico Iyer.

6398 ft above sea level

The perforated funnels of the air conditioning duct had been spitting cold spears all night long. As I absent-mindedly tried to stretch my frozen, numb legs, my knee jerked in pain as it hit the seat in front of me. Squinting open my eyes, I realized that for the last twelve hours I had been inside a ‘luxury’ Volvo bus scrambling up the mountains of Himachal. Moving the curtain on the tainted glass, I saw the dawn sky was still drenched in a deep gray. As the bus revved up its speed, the shadowy moon seemed to change its pallor and merge with the clusters of stars serenading it. In between steep gradients and hair pin bends, I saw the first silhouettes of the mountains. In the fifteen hour up hill road journey from Delhi to Manali, most of the kilometers are lapped up in the night. The break for tea, at five a.m. usually coincides with the mellow yet graceful change of lighting that sets into motion somewhere beyond the mountains. As I stepped out of the hostile chill of the Volvo, my numb fingertips tingled back to life as a breeze with a nip softly blew across.

The long rows of steps of the road side dhaba were beaded with colorful backpackers from the West; some feverishly brushing their teeth at the broken wash basin, some hunched over a cup of warm chai, others covered in a purple haze, sonorously singing Yellow Submarine. Made in aluminum kettles over kerosene stoves and served in glass tumblers, my first cup of tea in the mountains was hot and sweet. Filing back into the bus, we resumed our journey to Manali. As the sun slowly fanned out majestically in the speckless, blue sky, the obscure silhouettes gave way to a resplendent landscape of green, white and brown. Every two miles apart or so were rustic wooden and stone houses built on stilts with sloping roofs and tiny windows. The doorway, usually accessible by a wooden ladder, too was above ground level. Kullu and Manali are dotted with such houses, though nowadays, wood is giving way to cement and bricks. Mostly a hue of brown or red, snuggled in the valley, the houses look cozy with a lazy tail of smoke escaping out of most chimneys.

Kullu, which is forty-five kilometers en route to Manali, is a stopover for adventure sports for most tourists. People flock here for snow sports like skiing in the winters and other adventure sports like white water rafting and zorbiing during the summers. An hour and a half later, the bus finally entered the narrow streets of Manali. The abode of Manu, as the name literally means, no longer wears a demure, sleepy haven look. It is splattered with hotels of all sizes and colors on either sides of the road. Tucked in between the clutter that is the Manali market, are interesting, tiny eating joints and watering holes. Men and women wrapped up in shawls and jackets, sporting canvas shoes with a basket on their back, are a common sight on these streets. The bus arduously carried its bovine bulk through the narrow, crowded streets and finally halted in a bustling depot.

We stepped out to a bunch of eager ‘guides’ animatedly welcoming us to Manali and simultaneously rattling off a string of hotel and sightseeing options, available at affordable rates. So much for a heavenly abode! Before we could be accosted with more offers, we were quickly ferreted out of the bus into jeeps that were waiting to carry us to Solang Valley, situated thirteen kilometers from Manali. The morning sun was warm and a sweet smell of pine wafted through the Himalayan air.

I could already feel the vertigo of lightness.

What's on my calendar?

Prufrock said,
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?," and, "Do I dare?"
Time to go back and descend the stair.
[...]
Do I dare disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
April?
Is not for decisions.

Henri Bresson “Hyères, France, 1932″

What's it going to be then, eh?

Philosopher once told me, "It is also about empowerment. Your decision empowers YOU. If you don't decide, someone decides for you. You don't have the power -THEY have the power over you. You are forced (into a position). You have to learn to make that choice.. It is your freedom."

His words come back with a fiery determination to me this morning, as I put down Burgess' Clockwork Orange and got a call from my work place asking me about my commitments for the next academic year. I said I might want to quit. I thought I was finally making a choice. But they said, we could negotiate. We don't want you to quit.
I'm back to square one, I dislike making choices.

But after reading Burgess' book I'm forced to retract my statement. Burgess says, without choice man ceases to be man. It's worth reading the book or watching Kubricks sensationally notorious film for people like us who live in democratic, yet State controlled societes. Choice is important. To the state, like Auden says in "The Unknown Citizen", we are merely a number. With our power of choice taken away, we become mere clockwork orange, like Alex in the book. Some lines from the book that intrigued me:
'Choice,' rumbled a rich deep goloss. I viddied it belonged to the prison charlie. 'He has no real choice, has he? Self interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self debasement. His insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrong doer. He ceases to be a creature capable of moral choice.'
'These are subtleties,' like smiled Dr. Brodsky. 'We are not concerned with motive, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down crime-'
'Me, me, me. How about me? Where do I come into all this? Am I like just some animal or dog? Am I just to be like a clock work orange?'
'What's it going to be then, eh?'