Service with a smile / frown / scowl / look of intense concentration

One of my favourite short stories of all time is this episode in Calvino's Mr. Palomar, where Palomar is strolling along on a beach and comes upon a woman sunbathing topless. Embarassed, he looks away instantly, and keeps his eyes fixed on the sea till he's safely past her. Thinking about it though, he realises that in a sense not looking at all is as bad as staring openly. So he goes back past her, this time glancing at her in passing but paying her no special attention. Then he figures that by doing this he's dehumanised her (she's a woman after all, not some piece of driftwood) and so he goes back and this time looks at her appreciatively and then walks on...and so on. It's a brilliant story - encapsulating in a few short pages Calvino's incredible gift for variation, for intimate intelligence, for human comedy.

It's a story I'm reminded of each time I fly, because I've never quite figured out how to act with air-hostesses, especially good looking ones. First I'll be super-friendly and smile eagerly at them. Then I'll worry that she'll get the wrong impression and think I'm some sort of lech - one of those guys who will randomly come on to anything in a skirt. So the next time she comes around, I'll be all brusque. I'll sit there reading my book (thus emphasising my hyper-intellectual status) and vaguely look up the second time she says 'Sir', not looking at her at all, and taking whatever she's handing me with a gruff, distracted air. But wait, now I'm just being one of those rude people who are so caught up in their own lives they treat others like their slaves. She's not a machine, for god's sake, she's a person. What I need is a smile that manages to be friendly without being presumptuous, a goodwill smile, the kind of smile that says I respect you as a fellow-citizen in a democratic universe, but otherwise I have no interest in you. I consider addressing her as comrade. I spend the next ten minutes trying to surreptitiously practise this smile behind my raised book.

Then I think, wait - how am I going to explain to her (in this hypothetical conversation I'm now having with her in my head) that I'm not interested in her? She's going to think I'm gay; worse, she's going to think I'm married. How do I convey to her that this is not true? When she comes around with the drink service, can I say something like, "My ex-girlfriend (emphasis on GIRL-friend) would have made me have a Sprite with no ice; but I'm safely single now, so I think I'll have a diet Coke instead"? Is that allowed under FAA regulations? And no, no, that sounds even more like a chat-up line. How do I convince her that I'm not interested in her? Maybe I could add something chatty about how it didn't work out because I can't possibly date someone who hasn't read Sophocles? Do airline stewardesses read Sophocles? Maybe just that bit in Electra? Is it fair to get her hopes up and break her heart that way?

When she finally comes around with the drink service, I smile sweetly and say, "No thanks." in a kindly voice - thus conveying that I think she's really attractive, but I have given up on such material pleasures and acquired a zen-like ascetism that does not permit me to either sip orange juice or ravish her in the aft lavatory. Phew! Finally that's over. I feel like I've just ended a serious, long-term relationship (hey! it's a transatlantic flight, we've been together for all of 16 hours - by my standards, that's marriage). Somewhere out there in the darkness there's a piano playing 'As Time Goes By'. I consider scribbling "We'll always have Air France" on a napkin and slipping it into her hand as I leave.

Obviously, there's a part of me that recognises that she doesn't even know I exist, and probably wouldn't notice if I painted my nose red and made monkey faces at her each time she came over to serve me. The thing is that it's a long flight and I need to worry about something and it's either this or imagining what it would feel like if the airplane suddenly burst open and I found myself in free-fall towards the earth (in what the captain helpfully informs me is -45 C) , though still strapped into my seat (remember the whale and the petunias?). So in a way, trying to figure out how to smile at the airhostess is good for me. Still, it's one of the reasons I'm so much happier flying Indian Airlines - at least with the stout matrons they have as stewardesses there is none of this palpable sexual tension. They know they're too old for me, I know they're too old for me, we both slip easily into our aunty-beta roles, and I can just sit back and let myself be pampered.

P.S. Speaking of being pampered, I have this vivid memory of being eight years old and flying back home on a plane by myself. The airline had this special program for young children flying alone - you handed them over to the staff at the check-in counter, and a stewardess would escort them to the plane, make sure they were safely seated and properly taken care of through the flight, and then hand them over to an adult who came to collect them on the other end (my Dad had to sign a receipt that said: Received One Son). I still remember being made to walk across the tarmac to the plane because they pre-boarded me and this was before they had ramps - I felt all special because it was such an adventure and also really scared because I could see all these massive airliners driving about and I was terrified of getting run over. I got unbelievably pampered that day, though. There's something about an insanely cute 8-year old (believe it or not, I used to be an incredibly cute kid) who is all serious and grown-up and travelling by himself that acts like cat-nip on airhostesses. And every fellow-passenger over thirty.

Bombay Weekend - Post 2 of 2

In which Falstaff goes on another rambling, sentimental and entirely self-obsessed memory trip. In case of feelings of nausea half way through I recommend putting your head between your knees and taking deep breaths. And promise that I shall return to regular programming once I've got this out of my system

Day 3

Saturday morning. R is still asleep at 9:30 in the morning (why do all of my friends have this fetish for sleeping late on holidays?) when I slip out to have coffee with a friend. The Barista we land up in is empty at this hour, which is a relief, even though it does mean that my friend and I feel singled out, the wait-staff watching us like vultures, waiting for us to abandon our cups so that they can swoop down on them. I order a double espresso, try to hide my annoyance when the woman at the counter goes into the routine of telling me that it’s strong black coffee, etc. Do they still need to do this? I consider upping the stakes on her by asking if she can make me a quadruple espresso, just to see the look on her face, then content myself by looking at her with utter contempt when she offers me sugar. Real coffee at last! I take a sip and feel the caffeine humming through me, like turning on the ignition and feeling some secret engine inside me come to life.

Meeting done, I return to R’s apartment, to find he’s finally awake. We sit around on his bean bags, chatting about the old days for a while, passing the conversation back and forth between us like a shared bottle of lukewarm beer, Shruti Sadolikar playing in the background. There is little new we have to say to each other – I saw him in New York a few months ago, and we’ve stayed in touch since – but this conversation is its own point, a dialogue as formal as a ritual, as a ceremony, a series of improvised counterpoints, the essential music of companionship.

By two in the afternoon we’re both hungry, and head out to King’s Circle to grab lunch at Madras Café. One plate idli drowned in an ocean of sambar, one dosa, one bisi bele bhaat and two steel tumblers of sugary coffee later, I’m wallowing in a sense of profound satiation. Our route back takes us past Haji Ali, where the sight of the Juice Centre brings back memories of the taste of the year’s first mangoes. Others may wax eloquent about Marine Drive, but for me Haji Ali remains the most emblematic and magical of all Bombay’s seaside drives – this glorious half moon of a road, like a breath of fresh air between the cramped confines of Pedder Road and the tall towers of Worli, a line of black rocks underlining the seas restlessness, waves crashing against them, nipping at the feet of people who walk across to the island shrine, looking as though they walked on water. And the shrine itself, like a mirage in reverse, rising out of this sickle bay as if transported there by some absent-minded genie. And the quiet lapping of waters in the lagoon, the odd boat bobbing in its gentle waters like an oversized cradle.

By the time we get back to R's place, it’s almost five in the afternoon. R catches up on some work he has to get done, I read for a while, and then we’re off again, this time headed south to catch the Banganga festival, where Chaurasia is playing tonight. Neither of us has ever been to Banganga before, and the directions we’ve received involve turning right after we get to a white wall (which turn out to be surprisingly common) so that we’re a little concerned about getting lost. We make it on time, however, and Banganga turns out to be this rectangular pond (the technical term, our cab driver informs us, contemptuously, is ‘talao’ - but I don’t know how to translate that), with broken stone steps leading down to the water and quaint little temples all around. We pay close attention to these temples because we don’t actually have tickets for the concert and have been told that if you’re not too fussed about actually watching the performance (we’re not – this is Chaurasia, for god’s sake, I’m going to have my eyes shut for the larger part of the concert anyway) then you can sit in one of the temples and hear the whole concert fairly well. As it turns out, however, there are still a few tickets available at the venue, so we find ourselves sitting on the carpeted stone steps that make up the auditorium here, strategically positioned for maximum leg space and a centre view, with R desperately trying to sms the 1500 people he’s invited to come find us in some temple somewhere (when he’s not being a friend of mine, R is one of the most exuberantly social and outgoing people I know).

The venue’s charming enough to look at, but the concert itself is a bit of a wash out. Not that Chaurasia isn’t as brilliant as always (though I have to say this evening is not one of his most inspired performances) – there are points in his rendition of Raga Des where I’m almost in tears and also dying of laughter – but the sound system is the most excruciatingly terrible I’ve ever heard, and for a purist like me there are way too many external noises – ducks quacking in the pond, the clang of temple bells, people’s cell phones going off at regular intervals [1]. This is made worse by the fact that the organisers don’t bother to stop entry to the venue after the concert actually starts, so that for the first forty-five minutes R and I (who thought we’d done a smart thing by sitting with an aisle in front of us, thus ensuring that we would have maximum space to stretch) find ourselves on the edge of a bustling thoroughfare, with people tripping their awkward way past us every five seconds, usually pausing to tread on our toes. This is so distracting that I barely hear the first alaap. Nor are our woes over yet – there’s a half hour respite while everyone sits and listens to the concert in silence, then people start to leave, and the whole process of ‘Ouch!’ ‘Oh, excuse me!’ ‘Sshhhh!’ is repeated all over again, only this time by people on their way out. Sigh.

The trouble, it seems to me, is that the concert is more an event than a performance, so that there are more people here who want to be seen at a Chaurasia concert than want to actually be at one. The result is that I’m surrounded on all sides by a bunch of polythene crumpling, cell-phone wielding, loud-talking cretins. The worst of these morons is undoubtably the Governor of Maharashtra, who, having been invited to light the lamp, decides to leave half-way through the first raga, thus ensuring that Chaurasia’s sublime flute is forced to compete with the gunned engines and beeping horns of his security retinue (who in his right mind would want to assassinate so completely irrelevant a cipher as a state governor anyway?). A special mention must be made, however, of young lady in orange, clearly the girlfriend of one of the zillion press photographers covering the event, who insisted on having a very visual argument with her boyfriend, telling him that she was hungry and wanted dinner and wasn’t he done yet, standing right next to the stage in full view of a few thousand people. Not to forget the lady who delivered the ‘Welcome Address’, which consisted of a series of incoherent poly-syllabic phrases, delivered in a flat monotone, in which she compared Panditji’s playing to the great flute may-stro Gene Pear Rample. Cretins.

Concert over, R and I bitch about it for a while, then head to the Konkan Café for dinner, figuring it’s the only place we have any chance of getting a table in Bombay at 9:30 pm on a Saturday Night (Douglas Adams was wrong about this you know – the final phase of civilised evolution is not reached by asking the question where shall we go for lunch?; the truly sophisticated civilisation is the one where you have to ask – where can we get a table before midnight?). As we plough our way through their non-veg thali (that incredible mango fish!) I find myself savouring both the contrast between this meal and the one we had for lunch, as well as the delicate counterpoint of dry Chardonnay balanced against spicy rasam. By the time we get back to R's place, we’re both ready to doze off at once, and R’s enthusiasm for his flight the next morning (he’s flying to a certain pretentious metropolis in Eastern India) has completely evaporated, prompting him to reschedule his trip to Monday. I sit gleefully by as he argues with someone at Jet, desperately tries to contact his office travel desk at half past midnight on a Sunday morning, and finally manages to modify all his plans, waiting eagerly for the moment when he puts down the phone and I can tell him this is what he should have done all along.

Day 4.

Sunday morning. My last day in Bombay before I head back to Delhi. R is fast asleep again, so I head over to Bandra to finally meet up with S. S and I haven’t seen each other for a long time now, and a lot has happened in her life since we last met, so we have a lot of catching up to do. Except that some five minutes after I get to her place, her father, remembering that I’m at Wharton, hijacks me into some discussion of knowledge management in the Pharma sector (of which I know absolutely nothing, though that, of course, doesn’t stop me from holding up my end of the conversation and managing to sound intelligent as hell).

Escaping from her house, I promise to meet S later in the afternoon so we can really talk, and head over to St. Andrews auditorium to catch the Akanksha musical in its final performance. All through this trip I’ve been amazed at the way my sense of direction in Bombay has not deserted me – the way I’ve been able to pick the one route that will take me exactly where I want to go, despite not having travelled these roads for so long. I’m particularly impressed by the fact that I manage to make my way to St. Andrews, a feat that requires successfully navigating a series of narrow Bandra side streets and that I was never able to pull off even when I actually lived in Bombay.

The musical is a glorious and touching event for me. It’s not really the sort of thing I would usually have enjoyed - it’s glitzy and loud and pulls all the obvious tricks - but I’m not paying as much attention to the performance itself as I am to the children performing it, these eager, half-familiar faces whose hope and enthusiasm I find, in a bout of uncharacteristic sentimentality, incredibly moving. There is much in this performance that makes me cringe, but there is less to cringe at then their would be in any other school performance, and I defy any group of children, from any socio-economic background whatsoever, to do a finer job. And that, when you consider the conditions these children live and grew up in, is a minor miracle.

Musical over, I have lunch with another friend, this time squeezing into a tiny restaurant sandwiched between Lemon Grass and Pot Pourri that serves the most hideous Punjabi Chinese food I have ever eaten. This is a special treat for me, because if there is one cuisine I miss in the States it is Indian Chinese. You can get good Chinese food in the US, of course, but nowhere else can you get the precise flavour of American Chopsuey or Sweet and Sour paneer (I won’t even begin to talk about Schezwan Idlis). I gorge myself on a Chicken Dragon Sizzler (a delectable concoction that blends aloo ki subzi and rice with cubes of chicken bathed in spicy hot and sour sauce, topping the whole thing off with French fries!), inhaling about 2,000 lung fulls of pungent smoke in the process. By the end of it, I’m not sure if the tears in my eyes are caused by the memory of the musical, my nostalgia for Indian Chinese or pepper.

After lunch, I meet up with S and her fiancé, and we head out to Bandstand to catch the sunset, stopping in a café by the shore (the Barista, as usual, is impossible to find place in) where S orders French fries and I have a cup of black dishwater. Every time I visit Bandstand now, I find it busier, more crowded, and am overwhelmed with nostalgia for the way I first saw it, a deserted stretch of black rocks along the sea, skirted by a ruined path from which phantom steps led off to nowhere. No fancy coffee shops here then – just a broken down looking juice stand, and the shape-shifting hotel at the end of the promenade that is now the Taj Land’s End. That first summer we would spend long hours walking along this deserted road, trying to pay no attention to the couples making out among the rocks, sitting on thrones of black and broken stone talking poetry or walking down to the edge of the water with our jeans rolled up to let the waves wash over our ankles. We thought we were terribly independent and grown-up then, but looking back it feels like we were little more than children, and the promenade itself, undiscovered, unexplored, unexploited, seems like a metaphor for a quieter, more simple time. Looking at it now, the line that pops into my head comes from Wilfred Owen: “To go forever children, hand in hand. / The sea is rising…and the world is sand.”

I get back to R’s place by eight pm, to find he has just got back as well, and has brought a friend along. This friend greets me with a familiar, casual ‘hi!’ and no further introductions are forthcoming, so that I am left with the distinct impression that I’m supposed to know who she is. I have no idea, of course. I study her carefully, trying not to stare. Yes, she does look kind of familiar. Who is she? I toy with the idea that she might be one of R’s four dozen ex-‘girlfriends’, but discard it. Could it be someone we knew back in college? But surely in that case some explanation would have been in order.

After a while I stop agonising about it. Whoever she is, this woman can hold her vodka and appreciates Led Zep, even going so far as to forcibly turn up the volume when R demurs out of consideration for his neighbours. After that, a minor detail like her name is hardly relevant. We proceed to have a pleasant enough evening, my memories of which extend only to the point where I’m pouring my sixth drink and musing on the philosophical implications of being able to fit a square ice-cube into a round glass. Beyond this my recollections are a little hazy, but I’m told that a good time was had by all. When the mystery woman finally leaves, accompanied by loud proclamations from me to the effect that it’s been great seeing her again and we should definitely catch up more often, I turn to R and ask who she was. It turns out she’s a senior of ours from business school, someone I’ve spoken to barely three times in my life before this evening and therefore could not possibly be expected to recognise. I feel less guilty. I have another drink to celebrate. The last thing I manage to do before I pass out entirely is to set an alarm for five o’clock the next morning, the alarm that will send me zipping through the city’s deserted roads in another speeding taxi, getting me to the airport just in time for the flight that will take me away from Bombay, this ravishing mistress of cities, this beloved metropolis, my favourite place in all the world.

[1] To Chaurasia's credit, he's entirely unphased by all this, even stopping at one point to attempt an impromptu jugalbandi with one of the quacking ducks.

Bombay Weekend - Post 1 of 2

In case you're wondering why I haven't been posting for the last four days and scanning the newspapers anxiously for that news item about a man being dragged by a wild horse, the reason is that I was in Bombay for the weekend and didn't have Internet access (I know, I know; it wasn't as bad as it sounds though, at least I had a life). Not surprisingly, that's what the next two posts - this one and another to follow - are going to be about.

STATUTORY WARNING: The following description is unsuitable for young children, pregnant women, phenylketonurics or people with strong allergic reactions to blatant nostalgia

Day 1

This morning, Delhi is a city of white phantoms. Swirling walls of fog smother the city, blurring all perspective, until we are left with only the soft-focus immediacy of our own presence. On the road to the airport visibility is barely ten metres, but this doesn't deter my cab driver, who, having learnt how to drive from the Ravenous Bug-blatter beast of Trall clearly believes that if you can't see it, it can't hit you. As we zip along the more or less deserted road at a breezy 70 Km / hour, I feel as though I've entered an episode of the Twilight Zone. The drive has a nightmarish quality, at once gothic and existential, a coach ride towards oblivion, the headlights of oncoming traffic like so many ghosts peering out at us from the realm of shadows. Because I could not stop for Death. Or traffic lights.

By the time I get to the airport the fog has got worse, so that the airport is like some giant pupa, wrapped in a cocoon of sticky mist. The Indian Airlines ground staff seem unaffected by its presence however, refusing to let their natural optimism be dampened by such minor details. My flight is on time, I am told, by the man at the check-in counter who sits serene as a buddha behind his desk. When I try to point out that visibility outside is abysmal and not a single flight has taken off so far this morning, so that it seems unlikely that my flight could possibly be on time, he brushes my objections aside with a look of disdain for someone so naively alarmist. My flight is on time, he informs me again, with the air of someone making a great prophecy, and that's all there is to say.

Right. I meander over to the Cafe Coffee Day counter, figuring I might as well start the caffeine running in my system. For a company that generally specialises in disguised unemployment, Cafe Coffee Day has gone to considerable pains to ensure that this one counter is always woefully understaffed. Apparently it is company policy that one sleepy looking 16 year old in a creased orange t-shirt is just the right staffing configuration to serve 14 customers, all of whom are in a hurry because they have flights to miss. I stand patiently behind a bunch of stewardesses in hideous scarlet uniforms, finding myself unmoved, even repulsed by their phony accents, their plastic smiles, their make-up smothered, cookie-cutter look. Didn't anyone ever explain to these glorified mannequins that it's not a good idea to come between a man and his double espresso? Do people actually fly private airlines in order to be served by people like this?

An hour later I'm still sitting in the security lounge, reading Heaney, mouthing his glorious language to myself. The fog is as thick as ever. On the TV screen behind me, some shrill anchor is telling us about the disruption of flight services out of Delhi airport in that rushed, breathless voice without which no report is really NEWS. Like we hadn't noticed. Meanwhile, the airport terminal screens are still bravely insisting that my flight will leave on time. Finally, with forty-five minutes left to go to the scheduled departure of my flight, I get a phone call from the airlines. My flight has been delayed by an hour it seems. How surprising. How completely unexpected. How useful to know all of fifteen minutes before my flight is supposed to begin boarding. This way I can wait another hour before I leave my seat next to the gate.

Another hour and we're sitting on the tarmac, strapped into our seats, ready to take off. Another two hours and we're sitting on the tarmac, strapped into our seats, ready to take off. Another three hours and we're still sitting on the tarmac, still strapped into our seats, still ready to take off. By this time I've heard the tinny rendition of Scarborough Fair that passes for music on these flights some 3,478 times. I eye the cellphone my neighbour has been loudly talking into for the last hour (his son had aloo ki parathi for breakfast, and is now studying with Raju; his friend Mr. Sharma has gone to office despite having a bad cold, but it's okay because my neighbour, who moonlights as a quack when he's not being the most irritating person on the planet, has prescribed a nostrum that never fails, despite combining ginger and lime in ways too salacious to mention) and wonder if it's heavy enough to smash through his cranium. The growling of my stomach is beginning to drown out the airplane engines.

* * *

The first thing that hits me about Bombay when I finally get there (five hours late) is the heat. It's actually glorious weather, but coming in from Delhi it feels positively balmy. But there is another warmth here, one that starts deep in the heart and radiates slowly outward - a warmth that I feel sweeping over me as we turn onto the Western Express highway, head over to my grandparent's house. It is the warmth of memory.

Bombay is a city of nostalgia for me, a landscape at once photo album and palimpsest. Again and again, over the four days that I am here, I am struck by the sheer density of the memories that live here, the way they jostle each other in the streets, the way they crowd together like buildings. Every street corner, every tiny little by-lane has its share of stories - remember the time stories, wasn't this where stories, were you with me when stories. Stories of meetings held, decisions reached, books discussed, ideas debated, plays watched, bottles emptied, friendships forged. Stories of laughter and embarassment, accident and adventure, discovery and loss. No other city is as densely populated with memories I want to hold on to. No other city is so alive with things I shall never live again.

By the time I recover from this bout of sentimentality, we are at my grandparents house, and I remember that I'm hungry. Throwing caution and my plans for a balanced diet to the gentle breeze coming off the sea, I plunge headlong into the ocean of my grandmother's cooking, devouring it with a zeal that would make a bulldozer blush. Why is it that all grandmothers can cook like this? Are there special courses they have to take? Or is it all advertising - we are so conditioned to think of grandmothers as being great cooks that we define good food by the taste of our grandmother's cooking, so that the ubiquity of the grandmother's skill is merely tautology? As I spoon the last crumbs of my grandmother's Gajar ka Halwa into my mouth, I have no time for such subtleties; I sink gratefully into a fog of my own, giving myself easily to its mellowness.

Day 2

It's good to be back in Bombay after all these months away. The multiplicity and magic of the city is mirrored for me in the gaudy illustrations on the rear windshields of the black and yellow taxis. Hum Suffer, one says. Another announces Freedom, in the shape of young woman blowing a Unicorn off her cupped palms. And there is always that old favourite - a woman seated with her back to a tree, head pressed to raised knee in a gesture of abject waiting, the garish embodiment of the love who lies waiting, silently for me. And lapping around these images, or sometimes by itself, the bald statement of place - Borivili, Bandra, Malad - the sound of the names like the flat slap of water against a stone step. As my car noses its way through the morning traffic, I feel like a dolphin who, newly released from captivity, slides easily into the sossing and remembered waters. As we drive along the railway track, I find myself straining to remember the next station on the line, desperate to get it right as though my very past depended on it - which, in a way, it does.

Chinchpokli. The name says it all. Poky warehouses, decrepit mills, pinched little shops lining the narrow streets. Stones chimneys rising into the sky, unused like gods. You are in the heart of the city here, surrounded by people, and yet in a sense you are also in a ghost town, because the high ceilings of these dilapidated buildings are filled with a black and white silence, a sense of history brooding. This is a landscape of lost industry, of glory that has evaporated with time.

I am here to meet my former colleagues at Akanksha, an NGO that I worked with for a while before I left to do my PhD. As I walk into the office, the exuberance of their reception overwhelms me - I am shocked by how genuinely delighted they all seem to see me again, I feel both deeply loved and an impostor. I think of all the people who wondered why I quit my job with the Firm to go work for Akanksha. I wish they could be here in this room with me, I wish I could make them feel the affection in this room. In Immortality, Kundera argues that gesture (and therefore identity) exists independent of person, and that therefore an ideal or an idea can live through many different people. Walking into that room, I don't feel as though I'm returning to a former workplace, I feel as though I'm coming back to family.

By mid-afternoon I'm at Churchgate (having dumped my bag with R.) sitting at the Tea Centre, sipping my fourth cup of Darjeeling (the fact that every two cup pot of tea comes with a little over four cups is one of the things that most endears me to this place) and biting into the grilled Tuna Sandwich on Brown Bread that was, for years, my staple weekend lunch. The Tea Centre has changed a lot since I first started coming here, back in the summer of 2000 (I miss the quaint old photographs on the wall, the pianist playing Memory) but it still retains many of its gubernatorial trappings. The pretentious little silver bells on each table are still there (not that they're ever used) and the waitstaff still wears dark green turbans. Its noisier than I remember, but the chips they serve with the sandwich still have that trace of soggy staleness, and the tea is as brilliant as ever. It's good to be back.

Oxford is a disappointment, its poetry section shockingly scant and padded with dozens of identical volumes of putrid poetry by indifferent young Indian poets - some of the books so terribly mediocre that you have only to open a page at random to find something that will make you wince in pain. It's at Rhythm House, ironically, that I find what I'm looking for - a copy of Kolatkar's Kala Ghoda Poems which I've been dying to read ever since I learnt of their existence (I may have mentioned this earlier, but it is my firm opinion that Kolatkar is the greatest Indian poet to have written in English in the last century, bar none). This find sparks a frenzy of mad music buying, fuelled by the knowledge that Indian Classical CDs are hard to come by in the US. When the smoke clears I find myself carrying a basket overflowing with CDs - some picked up simply because they're such great deals, other because they're breathtaking records, including a performance of Ragas Mishra Bhairavi and Mishra Khamaj that features the combined talents of Vilayat Khan and Bismillah Khan, an unbelievably sublime recording. Staggering out with these new purchases of mine, I rush back to R.'s place, spend the rest of the day savouring my new acquisitions.

(more to come)

That cucumber shaped hole in my soul

I'm really, really bad at seeing shapes. You know how people will tell you "turn right at that building that's shaped like a ship" or "you can't miss it - it's the one with the tree outside that's shaped like an old man bending over to pick up his dentures"? Directions like that virtually guarantee that I'm going to get lost. It's not that I can't imagine shapes in things - it's just that I can't imagine the shapes I'm supposed to. When I finally get to this ship-shaped building I'll stare at it in amazement trying to figure out how someone could see a ship in it. A hunk of cheese, yes. A harp, possibly. Even, from a certain angle, Jennifer Aniston's hairstyle. But a ship? How? Where?

My first intimation of this curious failing of mine came from my early essays into astronomy. There I would be staring up at these patterns of stars, trying desperately to imagine them into bears and lions and scorpios and suchlike. That's Orion, the hunter? I'd say. Looks more like a drape gathered in at the centre to me. Or a model for one of those sari ads on TV. Why Orion? Because his arrow is pointing to what? Where? Oh, forget it, I give up.

Thinking back, I realise that the signs of my shape-blindness were present even when I was a still a little child playing join the dots in one of my umpteen 'activity books'. Even then I was always the last person to get what the shape was supposed to be. There'd be all of two dots left to be joined and I'd still be wondering what the hell this thing was. Grown-ups watching me would say "Oh! Look! It's an elephant" and I would connect the last few dots and sure enough it would be and I would stare at them in mystified admiration wondering how they could possibly have known. When they kept doing this with uncanny accuracy time after time again, I became convinced that there was a secret answer key to these things that was made available to adults and only denied to me (yes, I was hyper-paranoid even in those early days) and I couldn't wait to grow up and get my hands on this document. How easy it would be, I thought, if I could just look up what this shape was supposed to be somewhere, instead of going to all this silly effort just to find out that it was a clown wearing a hat.

It occurs to me now that this early obssession with join the dots puzzles may actually have contributed to my inability to see the right shapes in things. Accustomed to the level of detail in those puzzles, I may have lost the ability to take a more minimalist views of shapes. If this thing is supposed to be a hunter, I find myself asking, where is his quiver of arrows then? And shouldn't he have a sack to carry the meat back in? Is he that bad a hunter? Does he shave and if not, then where's his beard? It's this sort of thing that keeps me from seeing the shapes that everyone else seems to see.

Of course, the flip side of this affliction of mine is that I can see a shape I'm looking for in practically everything. Since I don't see the shape intuitively, it comes back to force-fitting that shape onto the object in question, and once you start down that path it's not hard to imagine how, from a certain angle, in a very convoluted way, every building could look like a ship, every combination of 7 stars could like a hunter. So any given night sky is full of Orions for me - Orion the dwarf, Orion the potbellied, Orion the hunter lying flat on his stomach to creep up on his prey, Orion the Bharatnatyam dancer.

Every now and then some kindly soul will try to point out the real Orion to me. This will consist of him or her pointing a finger in the general direction of the sky and saying something like - do you see that bright star over there, the one next to three duller ones? In a sky filled with stars, this is not a useful description. I'll look earnestly for a while, then finally pick a star at random and nod enthusiastically. My friend will then go on to describe some infinitely complicated pattern, none of which I will follow, all of which I will acknowledge in a loud, appreciative tone. After the lesson is complete I will thank my friend for having finally helped me see Orion, then slink away in bewilderment and the secret suspicion that my Orion is the real one and every one else has got it wrong.

P.S. As a further illustration of my incompetence with shapes - it took me years to figure out what people meant when they talked about hourglass figures, and even now I remain unconvinced about the analogy. I mean it's not really like a hourglass, is it, more like two slightly overlapping, high standard deviation normal curves rotated by 90 degrees and reflected in a mirror. The other day a friend of mine was saying something about pear shapes and apple shapes. Whatever. Personally, I think the whole world is bananas. (and please, no jokes about how you can't compare apples and oranges)

Nostalgia for an imagined homeland

What is it about the idea of a homeland that is so alluring to us? Why is it that this notion of belonging to some place has the power to captivate us, hold us hostage?

I'm a fake Kashmiri. I don't speak the language, have never visited Kashmir and, to the best of my knowledge, have no relatives living there. My only link to Kashmir is that at some point, shortly after they climbed down from the trees and realised that the ground could be more than something you use to break the occassional fall, my ancestors toodled down from the mountains and made their way into the Indo-Gangetic plain. Of course, centuries of intra-community breeding mean that I have a bloodline that is more or less pure Kashmiri, but except for chatting up cute nurses at blood banks (of which there are NONE) I'm not sure how that helps.

Despite that, or perhaps because of it, I am capable of the soggiest, most disgusting sentimentality about the Valley. Each time I hear of some new atrocity that the inhabitants of Kashmir have been subjected to, each time they achieve some new triumph, I begin thinking about what this means for the history of 'my people'. I can spend long hours reading misty-eyed prose about the glory of Srinagar or the beauty of high pastures surrounded by chinar trees, or the clear stillness of crystal pools nestled deep in the moutain's heart. Stuff like Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown or the incredible poems of Agha Shahid Ali can choke me with nostalgia, move me almost to tears. Kashmir, for me, remains a magical place, more myth than actual place, as fascinating as Macondo, and as illusory.

That this is foolishness, a kind of playacting, goes without saying (though, looked at differently, it is also a triumph of the imagination). The real question is why. Why do I feel this way about Kashmir? Could it be that there is such a thing as genetic memory, so that what I seem to feel is simply the distant echo of the lived experience of some long dead forefather? Or could it be that it is some quality of Kashmir itself that moves me - that the story of Kashmir, that legend of an Eden revoked, of a modern-day paradise destroyed, would touch my heart no matter where my family happened to come from?

Or perhaps this nostalgia of mine is little more than word association - that having been conditioned to see the word Kashmir as an inherent part of my identity, I am no longer able to hear those two syllables spoken without having them establish a connection to something deep and vital within me. Or perhaps this emotional attachment to Kashmir is simply a counterbalance to the sense of alienation I feel with the rest of the world, a surrogate womb, a metaphor of childhood and innocence made place. Perhaps it is simply that in order to be an exile (and not simply to feel like one) it is necessary to have a homeland one is exiled from. Perhaps we all need to believe in a place where we can be or become ourselves, a place where we shall no longer be at odds with the world. Perhaps this feeling of mine is nothing more than some vestigial territorial instinct - perhaps we all need a land that we can imagine ourselves fighting for, dying for - and Kashmir just happened to be the most logical choice.

Maybe there really is no place like home because home - like love, like revolution - can never be more than an idea.

The Klumps Strike Back: Coming soon to a theatre near you

Remember the Klumps? The cousin of mine who got married a couple of months back? Like most North Indian weddings, his wedding was a blatant travesty of good taste - a study in garish and obscure rituals laid over a hotbed of back-biting family politics - but it was an event I believed I had successfully avoided by being half way across the world at the time. In this, it seems, I was too optimistic (not a fault I'm often accused of). Klump Sr. showed up yesterday at our New Year Family Celebration [1] armed with four hours of footage of the wedding on two DVDs (no seriously, the damn thing was actually longer than Fanny och Alexander) and insisted that we all sit around and watch 'highlights' from the video, thus enabling us to relive the event in all its tacky tinsel glory. This would have been a silly enough indulgence in any company, but what made it totally ridiculous was the fact that every single person except me in that room had actually attended said wedding, so that the entire 'show' consisted of people pointing each other out with loud exclamations of "oh, look that's you! and look, that's me! and me again! and that's you again! and oh, there are the bride and groom, grinning like idiots for the 300th time in the first half hour!". I'm beginning to think Cain might have had a point. I mean if you had to choose between some stupid mark on your forehead (which could actually be pretty cool in this Harry Potter obsessed age) and relatives, which would you pick?

Do other families do crap like this as well - or is it just some deviant strain in the Klump gene code? Am I going to end up wanting to inflict my fatally boring photographs on people at parties at some point? Kill me now. Now.

It's at times like these that I wonder if technology is really worth it. People are always talking about the rights and wrongs of nuclear power and whether science should or should not be governed by moral laws. The more immediate question, I think, is whether technology should be governed by the laws of taste. The dark side of nuclear power is all well and good - but let's face it - people have always been pretty good at wiping each other out; the really urgent question is the dark side of technology - the way in which it allows people to inflict themselves on others in talentless, almost embarassing ways. The way it allows people to send the most imbecilic New Year messages to you on sms. The way it allows anyone and everyone to put their deathly dull photographs and videos on DVD, on the Web. The way communication ensures that you can run half way across the world but still not be safe from Family.

The trouble, I think, is that people haven't really thought through the effect of this sort of tastelessness on future generations. It's not that weddings were any less garish in my grandparent's time (though presumably there wasn't Indi-pop then), it's just that because of the lack of adequate technology, the only record that survives of that special day is one Sepia tinted photograph of the impossibly young bride and groom standing together in one stiff, contrived pose. This is part of the old-fashioned romance of marriage, its essential mythology. What happens to the idea of weddings when future generations can see for themselves how the weddings of their grandparents consisted largely of a bunch of grown-ups acting like lobotomised buffoons, making corny jokes and generally operating about two thousand feet below the lowest common denominator? [2]

The right answer to this moral issue is, of course, that people must learn to use technology responsibly. Like a former colleague of mine who ensured that the only photographs taken at his wedding were a dozen tasteful, carefully posed shots taken by a professional photographer. That still leaves us, however, with the problem with what we do about those from whom such levels of maturity cannot possibly be expected? When we find a country that we deem irresponsible in possession of nuclear weapons we levy embargoes against it (unless it's the United States, in which case we import its television programming into our homes and try to wipe out the last of our brain cells through repeated exposure to David Letterman). What do we do with relatives who insist on showing us their boring pictures? Any ideas, Mr. Annan?

Notes

[1] An annual ritual that involves some 2567 members of the Klump Clan, and bears a much closer resemblance to Dadar station during rush hour than to an intelligent meeting of civilised minds.

[2] Thinking about it, this could actually be a good thing - maybe if we show people the truth about how goofy they look at weddings they'll stop insisting on having them. Kind of like looking in a mirror and discovering that you're not Paul Newman.

Sad old year

Cliche n. 1 : a trite phrase or expression; also : the idea expressed by it; 2 : a hackneyed theme, characterization, or situation; 3 : something (as a menu item) that has become overly familiar or commonplace

The trouble I have with New Year's - in fact, the trouble I have with all festivals, special occassions, etc. - is cliche. Every year I make a sort of New Year pre-resolution - I resolve that I shall actually try to take this whole celebrating New Year thing seriously, I resolve that I shall make resolutions, shall shout Happy New Year loudly into the telephone everytime someone calls - even if it's a wrong number. Every year I promise myself that this is the year I'm not going to be my usual curmudgeonly self.

Like any good New Year resolution, this one usually lasts till about 10 in the morning on the 1st of January. By that time the tiresome repetition of the old formula has begun to get to me (what was it Dylan Thomas said: "I have longed to move away / From the hissing of the spent lie....I have longed to move away / From the repetition of salutes"), I've got to the point where my instinctive reaction to people wishing me a "Happy and Prosperous New Year" is: "Why do you think that will happen? Where's the empirical evidence?"

Holiday celebrations are not just cliched - which would imply merely creative exhaustion - they are actively anti-creative, that is to say they are built on the premise that traditions and formulas deserve to be celebrated. My problem with such Pavlovian glee is that it always seems to me to be a negation of the reasoning self, an insult to human intellect. We couldn't possibly find the imagination or intelligence to connect to those around us in a meaningful way [1], every trite doggerel that rhymes 'health' with 'wealth' seems to say to me, we are not conscious beings in control of our own destiny, capable of making choices, we are merely conditioned systems of stimulus and response. This may very well be true, of course, but that's no reason to flaunt or celebrate it.

The point is that by being anti-social and Scrooge-like on holidays I'm not simply being the bitter old man that I am - I'm actually striking a blow for the Dignity of Man, I'm trying to take back our rightful place in the firmament of thought. So there.

So if you really must, you and your disgustingly trite family go and have a happy and prosperous new year full of health, wealth and mocha cappucinos - just don't tell me about it.

Notes

[1] People will tell you that the New Year's and other such frivolous occassions are a great time to reconnect with people you've lost touch of. I'm all for that - it's just that I don't see how calling someone once a year and shouting Happy New Year at them and having them shout it back to you constitutes staying in touch with an actual person. I mean, my answering machine could do as much.

Magellan didn't have to deal with shit like this

Will someone please explain to me what the deal with this whole jet lag thing is? All you have to do is tell someone that you've flown in from the US and the first thing they'll ask you (often with real concern in their voice) is whether you're over your jet lag. As though jet lag were some sort of debilitating disease - like chicken pox, or the bubonic plague. I'm almost tempted to say, No, I'm not actually. In fact, it's now advanced to its final stage and my doctor says I only have another 48 hours to live. 57 and a half if you're in Philadelphia. You'd better not sit too close. It might be catching.

Part of my trouble with this whole jet lag thing is that I have absolutely no idea what people are talking about. I mean, look, I've done my share of long-haul international flights. And sure, they've left me feeling tired and aching and a little disoriented - but not any more so than, say, a long day at office (yes, I DO know what that feels like, thanks very much). I certainly haven't experienced anything that it would take me three or four days to recover from - I mean it's just a long flight, it's not childbirth. If anything, I usually end up getting more sleep on these long international flights than I do at home - simply because there isn't really that much else to do. And okay, so maybe I'll sleep a little longer than usual the first night I get in, but that's about it.

When I tell people this they simply refuse to believe me. They look at me suspicously, as though I hadn't flown from the US at all, but had simply been hiding out in my parent's cupboard for the last 18 months (talk about coming out of the closet. heh.). They'll quiz me keenly about when my flight left and from which airport and when it got here, as though hoping to trip me up on some detail or the other. When I finally manage to convince them that I have actually flown in from the US they'll get even more suspicious - old rumours about how I have martian blood in me will resurface. You can see them wondering if they should report me to Military Intelligence.

At some point all this gets to me. I start wondering if there's something wrong with me. I feel deprived. I consider writing to Continental Airlines pointing out that they never provided with the jet lag that was supposed to be covered in my ticket. I wonder if my inability to have jet lag is somehow linked to my inability to stay in meaningful relationships. Maybe the secret to a good marriage is the ability to feel really, really sleepy after a long flight.

I go look up Jet Lag in the Merriam-Webster dictionary [1], It's defined as a condition that is characterized by various psychological and physiological effects (as fatigue and irritability), occurs following long flight through several time zones, and probably results from disruption of circadian rhythms in the human body. Hmmm. Maybe the reason I don't have jet lag is because my usual levels of psychological disquiet and general fatigue and irritability are so high that a little more doesn't really make a difference - the way you never find out when the sea gets flooded. Or maybe it's just that I have really, really good circadian rhythms. Yes, that's probably it. You hear that, baby? I got rhythm. And circadian [2] rhythm at that. Who can ask for anything more?

Notes

[1] My trusty OED is back in Philly.

[2] Isn't circadian just a gorgeous, gorgeous word - Circe and Diana - what a combination!

Confession

This was not what he'd imagined death would be like. Not searchlights and barbed wire, not the loudspeakers blaring away in a hundred different languages, their message incoherent in each. Not these long lines of naked men who stood huddling into themselves for warmth because the fact of their deaths had turned their very skins into a memory that no one else could touch. Not the bitterness of this cold that seeped into you like a judgement, that echoed through the architecture of your bones like a great cry.

They shivered in it, these unfortunate men, shivered in the poverty of bodies grown slack with age, bodies whose shame they had long trusted only to the promised confidentiality of mirrors, so that to see their frailty so cruelly exposed here was to lose the will to look distance in the face. Some of the men were crying - coins of delicate silver falling from their eyes covered in blood. Others held their heads high in a trembling defiance. Terror hung in the air like smoke.

In the watchtowers above them, the guards seemed indifferent, even bored, their faces set in a permanent scowl. There was nothing new for them in this sight, and they thought of the souls of men as so much laundry - white trembling shapes to be pinned to the skyline and left out to dry. They held submachine guns in their hands and cigarettes between their lips, and their pitiless faces seemed in stark contrast to the feathery white of their uniforms, its starched wings curving out in perfect arcs on either side. Only once, when one of the waiting men seemed to stray away from the barely moving line, did the guards show a reaction, swivelling their guns towards the man in a quick, threatening motion, shouting something incomprehensible at him and ushering him back. The message was clear. Try to leave this line and you would be shot.

But what would it mean to get shot if you were already dead, he wondered? Would it hurt? Would it be fatal? Is it even possible to die a second time? Is death an infinite sequence then, with each death taking you further and further away from life, like points on a line that, having once interesected life, now moves away from it forever? What was going on here? What did all this mean? Could these guards be angels, he thought to himself. Could this be heaven? Surely not. Am I in hell then? Wouldn't they tell you before they sent you there, wouldn't they want to rub it in? Give you a long sermon gloating about the enormity of your sins and how it was too late to do anything about it, lingering lovingly over the details of the punishment to come? Surely you weren't expected to figure it all out for yourself - just land up this way, unannounced and minus your clothes, waiting patiently for someone to let you in. It was all too preposterous. Besides, Hell was supposed to be hot, not cold. So what was this place?

He considered asking the people standing next to him in line, but a few initial hellos had been met with incomprehension, and he realised that neither of his neighbours spoke English. It figured, he supposed - what with all the people dying every minute all over the world it wasn't exactly surprising. He tried to recall the little Spanish he'd learnt at high school, then gave it up as hopeless. He tried peering down the line to see if he could spot someone more familiar, someone who could perhaps understand him - but the faces of the men in this line had already taken on the gray anonymity of death, they had blurred like newspaper photographs, so that it was difficult to tell one man from another.

At least he wasn't hungry. He wondered if the processes of digestion and excretion still applied to him. He tried to sense his bladder but all he could feel inside him was emptiness - not hunger, but a hollowness complete in itself, as though someone had scooped all the insides out of him and left this outer shell behind. That's all we are, he thought to himself, walking eggshells, just waiting to be broken.

Three hours later (if time could still be thought of as passing in this place) the end of the line became visible - it was a squat, gray building, like a large shed or a barrack, rising out of the mist. When he finally reached it and stepped inside, a guard ushered him towards a table where a clerk sat on a high stool, a large register open before him. "Name?", the man asked, with the brisk officiousness of clerks everwhere. "Occupation?" "Date of Death?" "Place of death?" "Age at time of death?". The thin scratching sound of a pencil scribbling in his answers. He was confused now. Shouldn't the clerk be looking him up, instead of asking him for these details? He supposed this information would be passed on to those concerned. Maybe Death was like a bank, you took in all the day's deposits and then reconciled them in the back office.

When the clerk was done he handed him a slip of paper with a 12 digit number on it, and shouted "Next!" while waving at him to move on. There was a door on the other side. He walked through it and found himself in what looked like a dentist's office. Two labcoated assistants took the slip of paper from him, ushered him into the high chair in the centre of the room, strapped him in. For a moment he just sat there in silence, then, just as the questions in his mind were forming themselves into words, there was the clang of a machine and sharp, sudden pain sizzled up his arm. He cried out, his eyes clenching as he tried to overcome the agony. So it was still possible to feel pain after you were dead, he thought as his mind finally cleared. That was useful to know. He looked down. The twelve digit number from the slip of paper had been branded into his forearm. For the first time since he had died and come to this place, he felt truly afraid.

Shown out of the branding room by a guard, he found himself in the largest waiting room he had ever seen. Miles and miles of wooden benches stretched in every direction. Under the high, dimly-lit ceiling the silence echoed without aid from human voices. There was the fug of eternal waiting, of flights delayed forever, of trains that would never, ever arrive. As he sat down on a cold bench, it occured to him that the whole room looked vaguely like one of those stark churches he had seen on a trip to Austria, except that the place of the crucifix had been taken by a clock whose hands at stopped at midnight.

Every now and then a number was shouted out over the PA system in this room, and somewhere in the distance a wan figure would stand up, shuffle his way out. It didn't take much to see that the number of these calls was far exceeded by the number of people coming into the waiting area from the branding room, so that the number of people in the waiting room was constantly increasing. Were there some who never got called? he wondered. What if he was one of them, what if he had to spend all eternity on this wooden bench, like a common tramp, sleeping fitfully on its hard surface - or rather trying to believe in the possibility of sleep, which is the only belief still possible for those who have died.

It seemed like forever before his name was called; no, it seemed like an instant. It was difficult to judge in this place, where nothing happened. Can time be said to pass if nothing changes, he wondered, is there time in the empty forest before the tree falls? He didn't know. His brain felt fuzzy, out of focus. He moved towards the exit (there were no signs to guide him, but some instinct told him where it was) knowing only that almost anything would be better than getting stuck in this place.

At the exit, he was met by a couple of guards who confirmed his name, then whipped a hood over his head, and led him away. He went stumbling down invisible staircases, was dragged along passages that he recognised from their smell and from the constant sound of water dripping somewhere in the distance, so familiar from his nightmares. When the hood was taken off him, he found himself blinking in a tiny cell, its space almost entirely taken up by a large table at the other end of which sat the Questioner. He didn't know how he knew he was the Questioner - he just did. He wasn't dressed that differently from the other guards, but there was something about him, an air of authority, the sense of invisible threads of command spreading out from him to the others, like strands of some malign cobweb. He didn't look particularly threatening - he looked bored, and therein lay the secret of his menace.

The Questioner read out his name. He nodded. Suddenly a searing light was switched on right in his face, the pain of it slicing cleanly through his eyes. "Right", the Questioner said, "get on with it. Tell us the truth". "About what?", he asked, bewildered and in pain. "About yourself, your life", the Questioner answered, "look, we know you're a miserable sinner. We know you've committed adultery and murder and all those other sins. So don't waste our time. Just come clean now and it won't go too badly with you. Try to lie to us and we will have to hurt you. You don't want that." "But, but, I don't understand, who are you? What is this place? Am I in hell?" "No, hell is what's waiting for you when we're done with you. We're the angels of Death, we're here to get you to make a full confession of your sins before we send you through. But no more questions. Tell us what we want to hear or else. Now, how many people did you murder in your time on earth" "Me? Murder? No, no, I didn't kill anyone. I never even tried to harm anyone. Look, there's obviously been some mistake, I - " A stabbing pain in his left hand cut him short. He looked down and saw that one of the Questioner's assistants had tied a rusty thumbscrew onto his little finger, and was turning the handle to screw the point deep into his flesh. As he watched, he gave it another turn and the agony shot through his arm afresh. He tried to scream, but no sound came out. A thin pool of his blood was forming on the table, trickling through the cracks in the wood to the floor. He couldn't believe this was happening. He looked into the faces of his interrogators and saw no mercy there, only the jaded professionalism of men grown tired of repetitive work.

Perhaps he should just tell them what they wanted. In the stare of those eyes, he felt a deep sense of guilt swelling in him. Perhaps, after all, he had harmed someone, had killed someone. Something inside of him protested against this thought. No, no, he was innocent, this was all a mistake - he had to hold on to that, had to convince them that they'd got the wrong person. He gritted his teeth and prepared himself for the pain to come.

He didn't know how long it was before he opened his eyes and found that he was out of the cell and lying in a white hospital bed. Every inch of his body screamed with pain - he looked down and his hands were bandaged stumps, and he couldn't feel his right leg. He heard a bell ring somewhere and started in fear. What have they done to me? he thought.

The next time he regained consciousness, a kindly bearded face was peering down at him. "Congratulations", it said, "you've made it! A little rest here and you'll be all set to enter Heaven." "Heaven", he said, "I'm going to Heaven?". "Indeed you are", the doctor said, for it was now clear that that was what he was, "where else could a fine, pure person like you go?" "But the Questioner? The cell?" "That's all over with", the doctor said, brushing it aside lightly, "a mere formality, in fact. You've lost a leg, I'm afraid, and your hands will take a long time to heal, but your bones will mend eventually and then we'll fit you up with a prosthetic and you'll be on your way. It's nothing really, just a quick pit stop before you head out into eternity".

"I'm so relieved. I knew it was a mistake all along. I kept telling them that but they wouldn't believe me."

"Mistake?", the doctor said, his eyebrows rising, "No mistake - that's just standard procedure. You have to go through the angels of Death before you come here."

"But they tortured me, they did terrible things to me, you see yourself the wounds I have"

"So? There's nothing new in that. How would they find out whether you were innocent or not unless they interrogated you?"

"Shouldn't they know already? Don't they have records, couldn't they look them up to see if I've been a good person?"

The doctor laughed. "I see you're still labouring under the old human misconception that we watch over you while you're alive. We do nothing of the sort, of course - just think of the logistical difficulties of it - monitoring 6 billion people all the time. Besides, it's inefficient. Why go to all that trouble when we can just question it out of you when you get here?"

"But what if you accused someone of something they didn't do and they were so terrified of you that they admitted to it? I know I almost did."

"Weakness of character. Lying to the Angels of Death. All serious flaws I'm afraid. Look, okay, so maybe now and then we'll get someone who'll confess to something they didn't really do and will end up going to Hell when they deserved to make it to Heaven. So what? Heaven's pretty crowded anyway - they've got so much more space in Hell. It's not like a few less people up here is going to make a difference."

"So you mean that's all it comes down to - all those prayers and things we do down on Earth have no meaning - it's all about what you say in that interrogation cell?"

"Pretty much. Though, of course, there are parts of the ritual that are useful to us. The Angels of Death introduced the whole concept of confession to help them in their work, for example. They find that people who've been schooled in it will tell them what they want so much more readily. It makes their job a lot easier, and they've already got too much of a backlog. But enough talking. You should rest now. In a few days we'll be releasing you and then you can be happy forever and forget about all these sordid little details. Goodbye. I'll see later. Oh, and congratulations once again."

Watching the doctor leave, he sank back onto his pillow, lay staring at the pearly white ceiling for a while. Then he raised himself on one arm and looked at the ward around him. There they lay - the blessed - laid out in their beds of wretchedness, swathed in bandages, each man bearing bravely the wounds that had won him his place in heaven.

Don't worry, I've got it all on tape

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was this thing called the audio tape. It was a strange looking device - metaphor turned to machine - two toothed spools held together by wafer thin tape, turning in perfect unison like the engines of some fate in which good and bad were equally balanced and wound tightly together. In the world of the audio tape there was always yin and yang, Side A and Side B; you couldn't skip straight to the good stuff - you had to go endlessly back and forth, sometimes falling short, sometimes overshooting, before you found that one perfect instant that you wanted to be at. It was hard to believe that this clunky, plastic rectangle contained the voice of the Gods. Hard to believe that what those slow mill-wheels were grinding out was, in fact, Music.

It wasn't the greatest way to listen to music - the sound quality was often poor, the tapes themselves were notoriously prone to damage - they would thin out with wear or get damaged in the heat or sometimes the tape would get crumpled and the whole thing would jam and you'd pull the tape out of the deck and there'd be the long trail of the ribbon hanging out of the tape like entrails. But there was something deeply visceral about it, something intensely physical in the way you could jam the tape into a cassette deck, slam it shut, push play and watch the cogs starting to turn, the music flowing forward, outward. Plus it was a great way to carry music around - you could hardly slip an LP player into your pocket and walk around listening to music on your headphones.

The truth is, I belong to a generation that grew up on cassettes. Sure, my parents had an LP player when I was a kid and my Dad had this cool collection[1], but by the time I started buying my own music cassettes were the way to go. I got my first walkman when I was 11, and I was 19 before we had a CD player at home, so pretty much all through my teenage years, tapes were the only form of music I collected.

And boy, did I collect them. It wasn't just that I bought an insane amount of tapes - it was also the number I recorded off other people - making copies of tapes they owned (remember high speed dubbing?) or, in those later years when CDs were around but I couldn't afford them, taping them off other people's CDs. Even today, some 60% of my tapes are copies - mostly scratchy, poor quality recordings that the intensity of my adolescent years and my urgent hunger for more music turned into the most sublime sounds in the universe. I craved for those tapes like I did for nothing else on the planet (except maybe poetry anthologies - but that's a different post). , I connected to them in ways that only a heady mix of hormones, innocence and a deep, abiding boredom with school work can make possible. Other guys my age were obsessing about women, I was chasing after recordings. Every new tape that got added to my collection was a conquest, a rite of passage, a notch on my musical gun. Just the thought that I had a recording of Mozart's Piano Concertos 1, 2 and 3 waiting for me back at home was enough to keep me blissfully happy for weeks.

Okay, so it wasn't the kind of collection that was going to give the HMV archives a run for their money or anything. Even at its peak I doubt it was more than a couple of hundred tapes, which is not much, considering the amount of music I carry around on just my iPod. The point about it, though, was that it was a COLLECTION. Every one of those tapes had meant sacrifice and effort, every one of those tapes came packaged with both the exhileration of discovery and the crushing risk of disappointment, of loss. I had an emotional bond to each and every one of them, the way I don't have to my collection now.

For one thing, this was back in the days (high school, college) when money was a real constraint - so that the purchase of every cassette was a decision to be pondered and debated, and involved the kind of hard choices one never thought to find outside William Styron novels. Many's the time that I've lingered in a music store, looking longing at the recording of a Beethoven Piano Concerto or a Schubert Symphony, and then choosing something else, but promising in my heart that I would come back as soon as I could to rescue them from the shelf[2], if only they would be faithful, if only they would trust me (how does the Tracy Chapman song go: "I'll vow to come for you / If you'll wait for me"). And surely it was part of the glory of the music, part of its pathos, that it came at the cost of movies left unwatched, samosas left uneaten, masala chais left undrunk.

The other thing that made those tapes so precious was that in the world before Amazon and music mega-stores [3] good music (especially good classical music, or good jazz) was often hard to find. You couldn't just go online, scroll through a bunch of recordings and pick the one you liked best. A Berlin Philharmonic / Karajan recording was a serious windfall - and just the mythic hope of finding one would send you back to the Music Store at Khan Market again and again, like a deep-sea diver combing the sea-bed for doubloons. So that there was a real sense of achievement in finding a truly good recording and being able to show it proudly off to your friends (read: the three other people in the world who were as besotted with music as you were - everybody else had long since given you up as terminally wierd).

Finally, there was the very fragility of the medium, its manifestness. This wasn't some obscure series of electronic impulses hiding deep in the circuits of your iPod (forgive me, O Venerable One, Thou knowest I do love thee and would never compare aught to thee, save to Sing Thine Praises!) , this was music as tangible as it could get - all it took was a keen eye and a little imagination, and you could actually read the music right off the tape, you almost didn't need a player.

Perhaps part of growing up is betraying the things you love most dearly, about leaving them behind and pretending that you've moved on to something better and trying to ignore the ache in your heart that tells you that it doesn't matter if you have - to let go of something or someone you love is always a loss. Over the last five years I've focussed mostly on building my CD collection, and when I moved to the US 18 months ago, I decided that there was no way I could carry my tapes with me, so I bought CD versions of the ones I absolutely couldn't live without (my Dylan albums, for instance, or that fiery recording of Menuhin playing Beethoven's Violin Concerto) and put all of my tapes away in shelf and left them behind. It was a tough decision, a hard goodbye, but, I convinced myself, an unavoidable one. Conscious of my guilt, I convinced myself that it extended only to abandoning my tapes for a little while - I would return, I told myself, and they would still be here.

But treachery breeds further treachery, and to accept one blow is to make yourself strong enough to bear the next one. Staring at the shelf of cassettes lying open before me today, I finally had to admit the truth to myself - I was never coming back. Too many of those tapes were now duplicated in my CD / electronic collection, too many of them had sound too faint, too scratchy, too coloured by static for me to ever listen to them with anywhere near the joy I once brought to them. I love each and every one of these tapes, but the world has moved on, and the time has come when I must let at least some of them go.

I started by setting aside the ones that I absolutely could not give up. My Miles Davis albums, the complete set of Sony Jazz Classics that I bought when they first came out in India, the Beatles Live at the BBC, tape upon tape of Zakir Hussein and Vilayat Khan, Tracy Chapman singing Let it Rain, that version of La Boheme I sat up all night recording and then kept falling asleep in office the next day, a mixed Jazz tape my ex-girlfriend gave me - that sublime recording of Ella singing I ain't got nothing but the blues, the Reality Bites soundtrack, Dylan - Street Legal, Time out of Mind, yes, even Love and Theft. Oh, and that recording of Simon and Garfunkel a record shop owner in Jaipur made for my parents back in '87. The tape that defined poetry for me before I knew what poetry was.

Right. Still about 50 tapes left. I harden my heart - pick a few that I absolutely need to save, decide to let the others go. There's some good stuff here - my first ever Chopin tape (the kind of 'best of' tape that I've come to abhor - but still); the Doors; Indian Ocean's Kandisa, with its memories of WIMWI; Haydn's Die Schopfung, badly mutilated by scratches on the CD it was recorded from; a recording of Beethoven's 9th by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Riccardo Mutti conducting. But there's a point beyond which I have to stop deluding myself. There's a line that has to be drawn and this is where I've chosen to draw out. Better to get this over quick. Better to rip the bandage off and get rid off it before the numbness can turn to pain. Let these words answer for what is done, not to be done again. Let the judgement not be too heavy upon us.

This is not a blog post. It is an apology pretending to be one. It is a ritual meant to propitiate whatever dieties of music may be watching this trespass against their defenseless children. It is a requiem for the death of that part of me that could never have been so practical, so sensible, so ruthlessly logical. For the part of me that could never have sat thus in judgement over my own past. It is a Kaddish for 3,600 minutes of music that once helped me keep sane, that helped me grow into the very adult who is now discarding them. It is an apology. It is not enough.

Notes

[1] It was a nice-ish collection and I had some fond memories of it, but I was always a little puzzled by the depth of his obssession with it, the lengths he went to before he finally gave it up. I think I'm beginning to understand how he must have felt.

[2] I once bought a recording of excerpts from Swan Lake which I didn't really want only because it was sitting on a shelf in this tiny little electronics shop, between a recording of fifteen different version of the Macarena, and something called Get Down And Party 2. I figured the owner had simply been misled by the fact that the tape was called The Dance Album and couldn't stand the thought that someone might buy it expecting dhinchak beats. I figured it was up to me to keep Tchaikovsky safe from such cretins.

[2] I still remember flying to Singapore when I was in college and being completely blown away by the HMV store on Orchard Road (?). Ah, the joy of being that young, that naive.

In Between

Dawn finds me 30,000 feet over the Atlantic. The horizon is a parabola of fire, the air is the thin blue of freshly laundered sheets. On the screen above my head this plane is a tiny butterfly, flirting with the snout of Scandinavia.

Rubbing my eyes open, I put on my headphones, tune the in-flight entertainment system till I find a channel that sounds promising. Jazz. Monk's Blues. Monk and Coltrane, day and night, earth and sky. I hang suspended in the betweenness of things, trapped between these two continents of my self that stare at each other across a sea of stereotypes. It occurs to me that I am not simply travelling between cities - I am making a journey from one way of life to another. The change is there already, in the very language I hear spoken around me, the accents at once forgotten and familiar. This is not a trip, it is a voyage, an expedition into lands grown the more treacherous for not being entirely unknown. To revisit the country of my upbringing is to revisit my assumptions about whom I have grown up to be.

The significance of this visit - which has lain buried under the logistics of check-in, security, boarding, beverage carts - is beginning to dawn on me, its thin, cold light streaming through my window. This is not just another vacation, a voice in my head screams in panic, you're going home! I wonder if I went and asked the pilot nicely he would consider turning around and flying us back to Newark. Or failing, that, maybe I could just not get off the plane when we get to Delhi. Just keep sitting here. This seat's not so bad. Okay, so they designed the legroom with a one-legged dwarf in mind, but otherwise it's kind of comfy. The screen tells me that the temperature outside is -72 F. I try to imagine how cold that is. About as cold as loneliness, I figure.

I change audio channels. Frank Sinatra comes on, singing the theme from New York, New York. If I can make it there / I'll make it anywhere. I laugh delightedly, causing the couple sitting next to me to start in surprise. One of the best things about being a pessimist is that things always turn out so much better than you thought they would. I bury my nose into my Murakami, tell the hostess when she comes that I'll have idlis for breakfast, not the french omlette, and settle back to enjoy the rest of my flight.

What if this trip back turned out to be a lot of fun? This is a possibility that I've never considered before. I mull over it happily for a while, then the optimism tires me out and I fall asleep again.

Ye of little faiths

The trouble with most religious observances, it seems to me, is that they're not distinctive or outrageous enough. Some of them, it turns out, might actually make sense! That's no good. I mean, sure, we live in a fast-paced world and all that, but that doesn't mean we can afford to have our rituals and superstitions be practical - where's the faith in that? How are you going to prove that you're a true believer if the actions you take to demonstrate this to people aren't at least somewhat wrong-headed and inconvenient. You might as well claim that checking mail is an act of pious devotion.

Take this whole vegetarianism thing. Say you see someone eating a soy burger at a fast food joint. It could be that he's Hindu or Buddhist or something and doesn't eat meat. Or it could be that he's a heart patient, or on a diet. Or it could be that he's just read a lot of Shelley. Or maybe he had his taste buds shot off in Iraq and now actually likes soy. Or perhaps he's just from California. The point is you can't really tell, can you, so that if you are a Hindu there's basically no point in giving up steak because no one's going to think it noble of you anyway.

The whole point of all this religion mumbo-jumbo, after all, is that a) it sets you apart from everyone else and lets you turn up their nose at them and call them things like infidel behind their back (or, if you're a bona fide Ayatollah, to their face) b) it gives you an excuse to pick fights with total strangers and c) it gives you the opportunity to act morally affronted at regular intervals thus making everyone around you feel bad about themselves and putting them on a guilt trip that you can use to get things out of them later.

It follows that to make a good taboo work, you need to pick something that's commonly used, entirely unobjectionable but not too inconvenient to do without (you don't want, for example, to go around making essentials like fire or clothing or cappucinos taboo). Something like blow-dryers, say. Or forks. Picture yourself calling the waitress over in a restaurant, fixing her with a mournful stare, and informing her in a wounded voice that there are four forks on this table and you, as a devout Falstaffist consider forks to be the embodiment of Lucifer and so would she be so kind to remove them, and oh, could she also get you a new glass because your fork was touching this one. Or jumping out of your seat when the hairdresser starts blow-drying your hair, and grabbing a hairbrush and holding it in front of her crying "Get thee behind me, Satan!". Those are the kind of religions we need more off. Not the kind who go around slamming airliners into buildings, but the kind who consider ringing cell-phones blasphemous or believe fervently that to talk about your child at any point before he / she is 18 years old is to call down the blistering wrath of the Gods on his / her head.

Oh, and special days - how could I forget those. If you really want to grab attention, what you need is a religion where the 25th of December marks the death anniversary of your greatest prophet and is therefore a day of silence and mourning. Think what fun that would be. You could walk / drive around the city wearing black and looking glum, depressing the hell out of everyone else. If someone said Merry Christmas to you, you could turn around in shock and burst into tears and cry "How could you? How can you be so cold, so heartless? Don't you know our Great Panjandrum died today?" You'd be in all the papers. Civil rights groups all over the country would take up your cause and argue that being happy on Christmas was a sign of ethnic bias. Any office that put up a Happy Holidays poster in a public area would be considered a hostile work place.

If you really wanted to take this argument to its logical extreme you could decide to make a colour taboo. Say blue. That way you could object to the sky, argue that it offends you, refuse to leave your home on days when it's clear. If the people you work for try to fire you because you only get in to work maybe once in eight days (obviously this won't work with UK weather) you could accuse them of discriminating against you because of your religious beliefs and either keep your job despite doing nothing or get paid hefty damages.

And then people say that religion isn't relevant in our times.

Prospice

Fear Delhi? -- to see the fog outside my plane,
Feel airconditioning in my face,
When the announcements begin, and the captain explains
We are nearing the place.
The seat that won't incline, the cabin too warm,
The limited leg-room;
Here he comes, the Steward with his immigration forms,
We'll be there soon:
But the journey won't be done when the terminal's attained:
There'll be long hours in line,
Then a battle to fight ere our baggage be gained,
And that's if we're on time.
I was ever a frequent flier, so -- one flight more,
I can make it, I can last!
This movie is really crap, I'm tired, I'm bored
And time barely creeps past.
Come, let me taste the whole of this meal - I fear
It's at least two days old,
Bear the taste of it, wash it down with beer
Though it's greasy and cold.
For sudden the landing gear is released
And the plane descends
And the babies that scream, and the aunties with their 'Beta, please"
Shall dwindle, shall end,
I shall change, get rupees for my dollars,
And arrive at Arrivals,
I shall proclaim my destination, by a taxi-driver be collared,
And pray for survival.

(with apologies to Robert Browning)

P.S. In case you still haven't figured it out - I'm headed for Delhi this evening, spending the Winter break there. Now I know what Persephone must have felt like.

The Yuletide Spirit / I wish I had a river

I love Christmas. It's the one day of the year I allow myself to indulge in self pity. Not that I don't indulge in self pity on other days, but I do it covertly, and with a sense of guilt. It's only on Christmas that I really let myself go.

The thing about feeling sorry for yourself is that, like most indulgences, it must be partaken in moderation. It's like gooey chocolate cake - take too much of it and before you know it your ego will have bloated and you'll start taking yourself seriously and then you're really have reason to feel sorry for yourself (thus setting of a vicious circle). But the occassional orgy can be stimulating, and besides we're allowed to not have fun sometimes.

Christmas is a great day to be feeling sorry for yourself for a number of reasons. First, it's always a holiday and it's followed by a bunch of other holidays so that there's no risk of your having to distract yourself with work or chores or anything - you can sit back in the luxury of your home and get a full day's worth of moping done. Second, it's the one day in the year when the whole world will cooperate with you, help you feel even sorrier for yourself than you already do. Total strangers will wish you on the street - 'Merry Christmas', 'Happy Holidays' - thus rubbing salt into your wounds. Parks will be decorated with streamers and lights, buildings will be swarming with wreaths and mistletoe, everywhere you go you'll hear some nauseatingly saccharine jingle saying something about snow and sleighs and reindeer. What better setting to feel all blue and melancholy? Third, Christmas is always cold; if you're lucky, it'll be snowing or raining or something, so that the sky will be overcast and the day will look gloomy enough to match your mood, and at any rate there won't be any way that you can go out and get some sun and generally forget about your troubles; even better, all cafes and shops and restaurants will be closed, so that you're pretty much going to have to sit in your room alone. which makes all the moping you have to do so much easier. Finally, Christmas is a great time for special food treats - so that when you get to that point in your depression when you want to fill the hollowness of your life with food there's a wide variety of rum cakes and chocolate cakes and pies and other such delicacies to choose from.

So anyway, here's what my annual gloominess mudbath looks like. First I'll wake up really early in the morning and go out in the biting cold and wander about in the residential areas staring at all the houses where people are still asleep, having partied late on Christmas Eve, and will wake up to family and presents and an afternoon of mellow togetherness. I'll stare at all the christmas lights burning palely in the daytime because no one has got around to turning them off yet, and it'll make me think of my own life.

Then I'll go to office and check mail and confirm what I already know - that no one has written to me today because they all have a life. Next I'll go back to my apartment and listen to Bach's Christmas Oratorio - a Christmas ritual, please note, that I've had to invent, not having any other Christmas rituals that I can indulge in. After the Oratorio I'll move on to other Choral pieces - paying special attention to Mozart's mass in C and Schubert's Lazarus. At some point in the middle of this I'll have lunch, which I shall take great care to make as unappetising as possible (undercooked pasta left to go cold was the menu last year, if memory serves) so that I can then assuage my depression with half a pint of the chocolate ice cream I had the foresight to put by last night. To convince myself I'm bored I will take a nap in the afternoon. If I'm still feeling somewhat shakily cheerful, I'll call a friend who I know is going to be busy, listen to the merry sounds of the party behind her as she tells me she can't talk now but she'll call me back tomorrow. That should be enough. More choral music, then, in the background, while I read poetry - Tennyson's In Memoriam sounds like a promising bet this year; though there's really nothing like Shelley for these occasions - Julian and Maddalo, for instance, or Alastor. Maybe King Lear if it's snowing outside. Let's see.

Somewhere around my seventh cup of coffee I'll switch the music to Jazz. Miles first, say Quiet Nights followed by Kind of Blue. Then, with a subtlety Machiavelli would have been proud of - Louis Armstrong - a few cheerful little numbers and then that glorious trumpet solo on Swing Low Sweet Chariot that will leave my eyes blurry with tears.

Of course there'll be long periods in between when I'll simply sit there staring into space, thinking about all the things that are wrong with my life. If I'm feeling in a particularly inspired mood I'll think about the future, make it as dreary and hopeless as I can. On a really good day I can actually move myself to tears, just imagining how pointless and tragic the rest of my life is going to be, how terrible a waste of those adolescent years that my self-pity alchemises easily into 'the promise of my youth'.

At the point in the evening when the few people still left in my building (almost everyone has gone home. Sigh) are getting dressed up and going out to socialise I'll go do my laundry. I'll wear my most faded sweatshirt, my most frayed jeans. As I head down to the laundry room with my bulging bag of clothes, I'll think of myself as some sort of cut-price Santa Claus. Other people get presents, I'll think, all I've got is soiled underwear.

By the time the dinner hour comes along, I'll be tired. All this self-pity will be starting to weary me out. But I'll persevere. I won't have to cook again, because I'll have made enough in the morning to have left-overs - this will make it doubly depressing - not only because I'm eating left-overs, but because as I heat them in the microwave I can think about portion sizes and how difficult it is to cook for just one person, which will lead logically to the fact that I'm alone and am going to stay that way. I'll pretend that this crummy spaghetti I cooked for myself is actually a TV dinner. I'll wear my tightest T-shirt and sit slumped in position to emphasise my paunch so I can convince myself that I'm fat (not a hard thing to do, btw). I'll listen to every version of Ellington's Solitude that I own. Finally (and this is the piece de resistance) I'll go to bed EARLY, thus putting the official seal on the pointlessness of my existence.

I'll probably wake up all cheerful tomorrow, of course, but as Scarlett would say, "Tomorrow is another day"

Meanwhile, if you're one of those people who haven't seen the light and are actually trying to enjoy today (and yet, for some obscure reason are actually reading this on Christmas Day - loser!) - Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Bah Humbug.

Yes, but where is the heart?

People ask him if he's going somewhere for the holidays and he says, "Yes, I'm going back to India, actually", adding "for three weeks" if he wants to keep the conversation going. He would like to say he's going home, but something about putting it that way, saying 'home', makes him squeamish. The word tastes wrong somehow, like too-sticky candy.

What is home anyway? How do we define it, locate it, pin-point it on a map? The OED says: A dwelling-place, house, abode; the fixed residence of a family or household; the seat of domestic life and interests; one's own house; the dwelling in which one habitually lives, or which one regards as one's proper abode. Trust a dictionary to say everything without telling you anything. What if you don't live with your family, what if nothing in your life is fixed and you survive from one nine-month lease to another? What if you have no domestic interests? And what the hell is one's proper abode? Come to think of it, who even says abode anymore, except the people who translate B-grade Kung Fu movies?

Is home where the people most dear to you live? Then, yes, he is going home. Or is home the place where you live yourself, the place you are most comfortable in, the place that all the activities that matter to you are centred around? Then no, he is not going home, he is, in fact, leaving home and going back to a country that he will wear awkwardly at best, like a coat two sizes too small, his shoulders hunched into a shape that is no longer his. Or is home merely another name for a remembered childhood, the places you are nostalgic for, the city and the locality you grew up in, its markets and monuments and streets? If the quest for home is merely to follow the spoor of a wounded memory back through the undergrowth of time, then surely the search ends only in the womb. But no, even by that definition he is not going home, because in the time he has been away the world has changed - people have shifted, old buildings have been torn down and new ones put up in their place - home, like the river, is never the same.

"Home, where my thought’s escaping / Home, where my music’s playing / Home, where my love lies waiting / Silently for me". How many of those criteria does a place have to meet before you can call it home? What if each one of those places is a different place - is it possible to have multiple homes? And how is it possible to be both on vacation and at home at the same time? When did home become a tourist destination?

What was it Tennyson said? "all hath suffer'd change:/ For surely now our household hearths are cold, / Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:/ And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy". He wonders idly what a lotus tastes like.

Home is the place you belong in. The formula offers itself eagerly, shouting its message at him like an urchin with a newspaper. Belong in, belong to. For a moment he is tempted, then he shakes his head. No, that would just begin the cycle over again. One would have to ask: where do I belong? Who do I belong to? And the same doubts, the same questions would raise their heads. Besides, he does not want to 'belong', he wants only to own. He does not really desire to be loved or protected or advised - he sees these things at best as minor inconveniences and at worst as insults - he wants only to love, to protect, to advise. The inconsistency of this stand does not escape him, but it comes back, in his head, to the idea of virtue. If caring for others is a virtue, then surely by caring more for them then they care for us, by being more virtuous than them (is God a relativist, he wonders, does he grade on a bell curve?) we do them a disservice. These are weighty matters.

How do other people do it? How do other people say words like home and love and good and wrong and happiness so blithely, never pausing (it seems to him) to think exactly what it is they mean. Can it be true that the unexamined life is the only truly happy one, that life itself is the one gift horse you should never look in the mouth?

Where is home for him?

What if there isn't one? What if home is only an idea in his head, a fantasy, the colour of grass on the other side of the fence. What if home is truly a mythic place, like Neverland, or Narnia, or Oz. Yes, like Oz. What if Kansas no longer exists and at the end of all these sunlit roads there is no 'whiz of a wizard' but only a wrinkled and ineffectual old man? Does he really need a home? If homesickness is only a kind of gravity then surely there is some velocity at which it is possible to escape it, to leave it behind forever. Can he not find that velocity?

Ships need anchors. The phrase hangs dripping in the air above him. Do they really? What happens to a ship that simply stays in deep waters, is it possible to survive only on stars, on directions? Is it possible to make the ship your world, or to build the world on your ship? Why this fondness for maritime metaphors anyway? Does that itself not betray a certain restlessness? Ships need anchors, yes, but they need anchors that they can retract easily into their own bodies, that they can carry away with them when the leave. An anchor left behind is no use to a ship.

If the longing for home is a kind of gravity, he thinks, then perhaps we are its satellites, falling always towards it without getting any closer. The image pleases him, because it suggests both loss and loneliness of being apart and the ferocious maintenance of one's own identity - forces centripetal and centrifugal.

Very well then. Yes, he is going home. He is just not sure that he will get there.