The Armchair Paradox

Heart-aches and realizations are wondrous murmurs. Unscheduled, variously encountered, and harbingers of change inevitable. 

Delicious and cloying is the inertia of rest. The warmth of the experience of a thousand languid mornings steeped like cats basking in the sun upon a tropical winter sunrise, seen from the cocoon of a sleep warmed duvet. 

Vicissitude by definition evokes those snooze button mashing reflexes. Memories ooze honey-esque to lull and dull every modicum, twinge, throb and instinct for inevitable, necessary transmutation.

The Bengali transcreation of আরামকেদারা (aaram kedara) for armchair and supine bliss is more apt than the English suggestion of mere support for the upper limbs in contrast. The trouble arises in getting off an aaram kedara. That it's wonderful? Undeniable!

So is slowly ripping a band-aid off, one hair pain twanging follicle at a time, from a progressing laceration.

Unarguably inevitable and essential. Maybe not so exhilarating. 

Just like shedding accumulated adipose, belongings, and task back-logs before a journey.

The first step that sparks of that journey of a million miles? Sweet chimera and delusion. It's rather unfashionable to dwell on the killing urge to sit right back. Straight after that step.

My landlord of the last eight years and I spoke of the chasm between the thought of change and the perspective of the hard deadline and it's sting of inevitability. In his acceptance into priesthood from laity he opined in wisdom, "...what if the armchair is just not there after I get off it?"

Shimla...

I met Shimla after penetrating darkness, and clouds that I mistook for fog, in a Himachal state transport bus. It seemed like yet another two horse town with pandering hotel touts and alarmingly only vegetarian momos.

That night poured its guts out to wash into a morning where the veil of clouds lifted to reveal a façade of human greed for habitation thrown like acid on a mountain's face. The British apparently built a summer capital called Shimla to grow up to a healthy twenty-five odd thousand as population in its middle age. Fast food and obesity was not a rage then. Now, the main city of Shimla crams in more than, a reported, 2.5 lakhs and then tops it up with a teeming infestation of tourists during 'season'. Sweet!

The population obesity muffin tops and spills over the mountainsides to places like 'New Shimla' and other inevitable additions. From a distance, my first morning in Shimla, smelt crisp and clean as a sun dried bedsheet after the Mumbai air. Then, Shimla 2.0 showed up like a scab on bruised mountainsides.

Imagine a seven layered wedding cake--with the layers kept up on tooth picks. That, is a building perched in 'new' Shimla. A night of torrential mountain rain gave way to a morning of soil gouged mountains. The inhabitants of my guest house excited thronged the balcony to speculate whether the alarmingly tilting building on the mountainside would topple and exterminate the inhabitants. The inhabitants of the afflicted construct in turn all gathered together, and unlike rational mortals, craned over the tilting edge to peer at the underside of their building. Underside? No really! Somebody wanted to build some more. So, the vegetation and pine trees holding the mountain surface around (translated to 'below' in mountain parlance) the building was cleared. The rain thought "Whee!" and pissed down and washed the soil away. Tada! Precarious building.
   
An army of people were clambering around in the disintegrating soil shovelling the draining soil one shovel at a time while others were draping livid blue tarpauline in fervent hope of denying the rain gods glee.

Ask someone and the response comes pat... Shimla has Mall Road. And assorted temples. A very sharp transition from British architecture to concrete invocations to a pantheon of gods and goddesses atop mountains. The local patois pronounces Mall Road as Maal Road. The ironic realization hit me when I first paid a tenner to ride an elevator to the roughly kilometre long stretch that sells and displays 'maal' of every hue colour and description in rows of shops. The trade then cascades down to Lakkar Bazar and Lower Bazaar that makes the cynosure of trading in the city. 

Shimla is a prime example of an opportunity lost for telling a story. The railway station lists the 'points of interest with a distance next to it like a take-away menu card has prices sans descriptions. I asked the gentleman at the Mall Road tourist office why the Scandal Point is called so and received repeated directions to it and exhortations to read the plaque there.

Yet, Shimla discovered on foot and experienced in contemplations the version I will recall.

The Clouds...
Stay long enough and the clouds you seen in the distance will come sniffing at you like a dog sniffing you awake on a cold morning. The warm sunshine snuffed for a while, the clouds will envelope you in a dampish cold steamish embrace... Once done sniffing, they will move away or even aerosol you a little before losing interest in you and moving away. The clouds make some of the most surreal lightscapes I have seen outside of an aircraft flying thousands of feet aloft. Travelling between Solan and Shimla, the sunsets are breathtaking with the clouds swirling around an orange orb. Edward Munch made ice cream in the sky with a swirling cloud strokes that swirled a palette from orange and magenta to lilac, purple, and mid night blue to bring in the evening. The clouds play peek-a-boo with our solar lantern and glow edge of the hills to fire with a brooding grey on top. Then night comes, the cloud curtain  draws back to show the sky ablaze with a billion stars on an inky blue-black night. 

The Flora and the rocks...
It is in the space between habitation that Himachal comes into its own. I experienced Himachal in a cusp of seasons as the rains furied, then abated leaving behind soft sunshine before the roll on to winter starts. Left alone, the conifers tower on either side of the black tarmac ribbon. The deodars reach out to the skies and make the sunshine glimmer in your eye. The creepers cascade down the boughs of the tallest trees like a cataract frozen as leaves. The cheel sprouts a livid young bottle brush green covering the mountainside. The sunshine spurts out in fingers of god through a cloud filigree to paint the rolling green landscape in light and shade. 
Little wild flowers sparkle pink, orange, red, yellow, lilac, indigo, and white like stars on earth through the fern fronds, grass, and green carpet shivering in the mountain breeze.  

The morning palette

Another morning rolls in to drench me with the sounds, smells, and experiences of this city. The window of green leaves, cloud of sparrow twitters, and purring kitties at my belly is a contrast to the impatiently honking and hurrying torrent just across the balcony.

I will soon dive in and kayak through the rapids of petrol, diesel, CNG and God knows what fumes. I'll jostle on auto-pilot and think of work till I reach my coop for the day. To exchange life and time for baubles to continue the moebius strip.

Another morning will soon be there...

Silence in motion

The silence moved with me. Pondering while I read of Ancient Evenings and of Distant Music from a slim little novel from happier times many light years away.  Kincaid and Francesca circled as moths around their flickering flames of yearning.

The Harbour line rakes whoosh in always behind the advertised time and whine away old and less shiny, stuffed with humanity as in an indifferent teddy bear. A little musty, well worn, and weary to the look, peeking from the open seams. Comforting though in a I-know-this-and-not-changing-anytime soon sort of a way. 

Reading about how "... in a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live..." makes for a strange transport on a Saturday evening. The "Why"s of a giving swirl in a cranium stilled.

Peregrine spirit musing on sliver of memory. Beatitude. Wistful. A memory that weighs the heart.  

Given along with Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Experienced apart. Felt.

Once upon a rain in Mumbai...

I noticed how I end up writing something when the rains start. I remember the electric atmosphere in Pune when the people in the office ran out and greeted the first showers on the terrace. I felt the rain, bathed in the energy, and rode back  in a cooler evening.

Rain Clouds gather over #Mumbai... #Mahim

Mumbai rains have a certain 'incessant' nature to them. It pours in sheets and lulls you in the initial moments into a certain soporific and temporary feeling of niceness. For a few moment the heat recedes. There is a cool breeze on your face and suddenly the Actinomycetes break out into a spontaneous aria flooding your senses with the aroma of a wet and joyous earth.

The grime, noxious fumes, the cavernous heat and the flurry of the Mumbai you know is suddenly different. You wake up to leaves and trees washed clean and dripping droplets of glistening freshness. You actually look at the grey and muted sky instead of nervously twitching to jump at the next fleeting local train, bus, auto rickshaw or taxi.

Clean and verdant Khargar after the first rains in Mumbai...

Mumbai has been kind to me. Especially the rains. When love turned her back and frowned it wept for me without while I did within. I have fond tactile memories of the change from walking out into murky evenings to fresh rain-cleansed-pink-light-polluted-yellow-sodium-vapour-lit journeys back to a home where rain quelled catties and kitties flowed in to greet my evenings.
If I ever write fiction, I might end up starting on a rain cleansed zephyr-like pavement before a Bandra-Kurla bus stop. Feeling the aerosol rain in my nostrils before stepping out to a squelching 62 bus ride lit all spectral and fluorescent, hurtling  through the night.

#Bandra Kurla Complex... evening at Bharatnagar bus stop during a pause in the first spell of rains

This city doesn't sleep. Nor does it let you. The quivering alertness keeps the adrenalin flowing. The first rains are perchance the only (temporary) respite to keep you from teetering off. A little release. This city is like the waves washing up brown and murky white foam on black shores and listless concrete. It roars in and gives hope, baubles, a few trinkets, hope--like heroin to a junkie, and then takes away--like the receding wave till you are left staring at the grains of your soul. Hope piled on greed, greed laced with lust, lust blinded sometimes in the dazzle eyed high beams of some form of trust, to a vertiginous and Promethean turn of liver pecks. Till one regenerates like the Promethean liver and becomes one with the cycle.  

But then--don't they say one has to be cruel to be kind? When you are done feeling good, you realize that you are now going to trudge through muck for four months, get stuck in insane traffic and perhaps drown in whiplash of a cloud burst. Really? Maybe not. Travelling to Saki Naka everyday, especially through the aftermath of some rain is training enough for Spartans. As the aeroplanes scream down overhead waggling the landing gear towards the tarmac some 30 feet away, I skid through the rain-water and oil laced concrete towards my office or grid down both my clutch plates and soul precariously thwacking trucks on either side. Ever noticed how it often rains ONLY in and around JariMari. Just out of spite. To leave you no option but to splotch your feet in the gruelly brown thing that passes for water. To inhale the fumes of a million stuck vehicles rumbling noxiousness into your being. The rain pours down in sheets, the your own little space in the helmet becomes your private little sauna and then your own little hell. Water pours in sheets and torrents from the heavens and seeps like acid through pores and cracks that never existed. The heat saps sweat in your rain coat and the fetid water sogs the crotch. Limbo. Cold, uncomfortable, resignation inducing and repeated till you submit.

The drains overflow. Brown becomes black. Black ooze becomes oil slick and chemical. The monsoon starts and continues with ferocity. The city media dusts off their standard fare of roads disintegrating and visuals of people wading through water. You are the disintegration and the wading through water. You are part of the entire Mumbai rains phenomenon now...

The silence between the drops...

As the rain clouds gathered I remembered the days in Pune when almost the entire floor rushed up to the terrace to get drenched (or at least feel the spray on themselves). Memories of smiles and the happiness writ on those faces light up brighter and more vivid than the brightest LED screens on display in the TV shops.


The met department is allegedly terming the rain that we experienced for the last few days "pre-monsoon" showers but yesterday when I experienced the rain at Bandra Bandstand I saw the people greeting the monsoon. I saw glimpses of the past in their smiles, the energy, and the happiness.


I have been itching to write this for the last few days. Ever since I saw the first rains. Technically I heard about the rain and then saw it like a TV on mute across a glass pane. Perhaps that is why it failed to trigger something emotive like the past few experiences. 


I cannot explain why I have this urge to write everytime it rains for the first time in a season. Perhaps it opens some flood gate of the soul as well. It is a sudden explosion of a whole lot of  sensory triggers—the absence of heat after a summer, the earthy petrichor smell of the first rain as the actinomycetes aerosol their spores into our noses, just the sight of the rain clouds, the feel of the rain drops on your skin, the verdant foliage and whole lot of things that are best experienced and never expressed. 


Mumbai has stoked a certain fire in the furnace of my being. With the clangour of the furnace, it has brought a certain numbness of my being. 

Affection stirs up old memories and joys...

My rented flat in Mahim (probably) firmly cemented my reputation as a crack pot in the eyes of all my acquaintances and friends. Nobody will probably understand why I instantly liked (and rented) a flat that divests me, monthly, of most of what I earn. I saw the two cats looking inquiringly at me, a wooden staircase, and the spectre of something from a warm and fuzzy from the past and made up mind.

I am resigned to the possibility of perhaps never having a pet. For various reasons. Mahim is one place where I could walk onto the street and immediately interact with happy and 'pet-like' animals. Both dogs and cats. I am sure if the hygiene permitted, I would be petting the rats and bandicoots as well.

I have never lived in a locality where the 'stray' animals on the road and so unabashedly affectionate as in Mahim. When J had questioned how I possibly could like the little coop she lives in, one of the many factors that had grown on me was the animal factor. Of course these are things I could never articulate at those crucial moments of inquiry.

Saddled with a cranky maid who severely detests cats (and open doors and windows) along with a landlord who advised "not to send up the cats if they come to your kitchen", I was in for a treat when a feline duo adopted me.

Now, the cats come to sleep every night at my place. The white cat had a litter of five kittens. Four white and a grey and orange one. When my dad came to visit me in December he woke up one night and was startled to  see a 'house full of cats' one night... The white one had come visiting with her entire brood!

To go home back to a cat (or any other animal) is very comforting and brings back floods of memories of Pune and catty.

On a lazy Sunday

The alternating blue and green eyes gene...

The offspring