The art of memory making: The Diu-Gir-Chunagarh episodes

* Dinner at the end of an exhausting day, muscles aching with unresponsiveness. Order whatever's easier to gobble up, (tomato soup+idly sambhar+vanilla icecream, if you may) and slink back deep into the chair with just the head visible over the table. Play Chopin's etudes and watch the place turn mute, your own personal pantomime. Figures dressed in black and white moving around as if in rectangular grooves, trays being carted about with the precision of weighing balances, an outside world's moving traffic trapped in framed glass, alphabet being scribbled into little notepads, mirrors on the walls reflecting brown light off the wavy woodwork above, a kid in the corner smiling with his grandfather... The edge of the table is your own personal piano and your fingers start rendering Chopin's compositions along the crispy white cloth.

Now, close your eyes and enter the perspective of somebody else sitting opposite you, look at yourself for a good minute or two and see your own sheepish smile gradually unfurl as you realise what's happening, where you are and what you're doing.

* The sea under a full moon night. The yellow ball in the sky keeps smiling at you until you smile back at it, the occasional star reminds you of its lonely existence, the sand's moisture melts beneath your feet, there's a silent conversation writing itself on the palm, Radiohead's on in your ears... Your throat's drying up, the falsetto's too hard to even imitate, there don't even seem to be words there in the song to be sung, just shapeless voices, but you still sing, sing as loudly as you can into the sea, into the endless folds of foamy darkness.

* Sunset at 5 40 pm. There's an abandoned room on the rocks, and you slip inside. The window's half open, peering out into the wide evening sea. There's a beautiful stranger on the ledge, reflecting into the sunset. Some feet play football, some hands throw a frisbee around trying to catch it, some heads just stay still listening to themselves think. Kishore Kumar's alive in your ears, and there's an orange dog posing on a cement plinth, hiding in the guise of a dustbin, lolling its tongue out and rolling its eyes towards you. The old man at the edge of the shore walks along slowly, as if on water, his silhouette burnt into the sun's dying rays.

* 9950 steps to the hilltop, they say. You patiently take a few at a time, knowing you're not going the distance anyway, memorising the rocky greenery around with random music. Blur's Song 2 comes on, and you decide to take the stairs at a sprint, not to stop till the song ends. The valleys by the side get more menacing, the trees start waving around like flags, companions fall behind, monkeys by the side stop and stare, your feet seem to have a mind of their own that disagrees with yours, there are little spots before your eyes, images fade in and fade out in your vision like a worn-out videotape, there are rocks in your lungs drumming on your diaphragm... Then the song ends. You rest by the rocks, spinning for breath. After a while, you throw up.

But you have a story to tell.

* A 60 km drive through the country in an autorickshaw. You sit at the back, legs dangling out of the back door looking down on the road. Cars approach you, smile and disappear to your right, fields and villages pass you by amid rocks stacked up into dusty walls, trees grow up in lines as if disciplined by a headmaster. You stick your head out and grin into the heavy breeze with foamy clouds in the sky, straight at the afternoon sun. Sing out into the disappearing road, the perforated white lines extending forever into the vanishing trees and the cornered hills. Suggestions include U2's With or without you, Nirvana's The Man who sold the world, One Republic's All fall down, Oasis's The importance of being idle, Blue Man Group's Sing along, Keane's Spiralling, Ana's We are, Lifehouse's Hanging by a moment, Nada Surf's See these bones, Darren Hayes's Like it or not, R.E.M.'s The great beyond and oh, oh, U2's A beautiful day.

* Just past the stroke of a new year, fireworks and wishes done with, you walk away from the crowd in the beach to the end until the shore ends, climb up the hilly rocks in the moonlight until the point where it juts out into the sea, find a rock shaped like a pear, sit down facing the dark dark sea. Listen to the waves crash into the rocks down below, the occasional burst of foam rising up into the air, and watch the pale white crests of silent waves in the distance calmly approaching their inevitable destiny. Let Pink Floyd play Coming Back to Life. Do not sing. I repeat: Do not sing. Do not talk. Do not write. Be. Just be.

[Purely for the sheer intensity of emotion felt, the following two moments need to be mentioned in a different league from the others, so here's an invisible line separating them from the others]

* Earphones where they belong, hands dug deep into denim, the Amelie soundtrack playing, you walk down a sloping road in the midst of a crowd, letting go of yourself, dissolving your identity in the sea of faces around you, taking in the view of the hills by the side, the green trees winking in the distance and the town below squinting its eyes to look up, you hop along, swaying your head freely to the accordion and carving shapes in the air to the piano with your moving feet on the stony road... There are no words to describe the feeling, none.

* Parasailing at 5 pm. The guy's getting you ready, strapping on the harness, setting the parasail right, mumbling instructions in your ears. There's red movement in the distance, the ropes start to tighten and a few steps later you see your feet lift themselves off the ground, the air gushing into your face. Radiohead's Go Slowly is playing in your ears, that falsetto you shall forever associate with this moment, gradually sinking into your heart and taking you higher, higher than you've ever gone, the sand is fast weaving itself into brown paper under your floating feet, the green hills in the distance are waiting with their arms open as if you were a bird, the sea is expanding endlessly into the blue confines of the sky's blurring edges... There's a way out of this world, and you've just taken it.

Tears

It's 646,

the ceiling's telling me things

of tales carved in invisible circles

when

my vision suddenly disperses into restless waves

as tears invade the moment,

announcing themselves to my eyes,

an abrupt mist interrupting a guileless landscape.

I know not why - I was laughing just a while ago

leaning into that brown door - and I find myself sitting up,

my cold feet suddenly pining for the floor's compassion,

and they trickle down to my dwindling lips,

singeing my skin's language like harsh tenses,

salinity, that unforgettable taste of childhood.

I know not why,

maybe it's just the dying decade's final december

maybe it's Larkin's eloquence with countrysides

maybe a loneliness caged in a velvety absence

maybe the evening's turquoise humanity, I know not

but before the unforgiving glare of my desk lamp

reduces them to obsolete trails on my cheek,

I catch a fleeting glimpse of my world - a roll of cellophane,

a wristwatch lying sideways, a yellow push pin,

a torn receipt, bronze keys on a steel ring -

and a smiling dawn breaks on my moist lips

as I fathom the imprecise whispers of eternity

through the magnanimous transparence of life.

[24th December, 2009 | 6:46 pm]

Musings from a shower

*. I'd rather be a wise fool than a foolish wise man.

*. Is it mere coincidence that the two cornerstones of my love for literature, Nabokov and Borges, were both born in 1899? I suspect not. Born into the last year of the nineteenth century, on the threshold of a temporal shift, unable to either reconcile with or break away from the conflicting worlds that raised them? (Though I suppose V.N. did a much better job of it towards the end of his life while J.L.B. seemed to choose to ignore it and ply his trade in timelessness instead)

[Further musings on this question are reserved for a better-researched literary essay later in life]

*. I hate my hair. Have never been able to figure out what to do with/to it. It has been, inarguably, the greatest unsolved problem of the last twenty five years of my life.

*. There are many ways of living.

I think dying is just another one of them.

*. There is so much directionless anger that resides within us, we never seem to know what to do with it or where to express it. We always get stuck in traffic when we need to be somewhere early, the delivery boy is always late when we're hungry, the internet connection's too slow when we need it, the friend's always busy when we need to talk, the bus is always crowded when we board it, everything we love is always way too damn expensive, the manager's always an idiot, the exams never end, the room's never clean no matter how hard we try...

I think this helplessness and futility that has seeped into the very heart of our existence, is what has, more than anything else in our joy-driven lives, come to characterise the generation that is ours.

*. Gravity is one of the most comforting and reassuring things in life.

Track 1, Radiohead: Kid A

Footsteps on the trembling membranes of sound, a hypnotic menagerie of tangled rhythms gently invading a soundscape.

Everything.

Everything.

The floor rises up, caving in to the elegant melody. The walls, as if taking a cue, curl outwards like a giant unfurling secret while the ceiling turns upside down into a cavernous sky. Through layers of melodies smeared into one another like swirling colours on an artist's palette, warped words rise up through the weight of their music, bursting like bubbles, crashing into each other, splintering into the air.

The room rearranges itself as instants rise and fall, like the aeolian vagaries of a feather wafting along a fickle breeze, things no longer defined by places, places no longer defined by things. The music evolves into a mutating monster, snarling at the floating walls melting in its charms. The candid transparency of the air descends into pearly fluidity, foamy shapes rippling like the unborn faces of a thousand melting seas. Disjointed dots blink on a shimmering screen, pictures awaken in sleeping frames, pages talk in forgotten languages and windows extend into spaces that didn't exist moments earlier.

Gravity's suspended in surprise as the tangle of voices and strings verbalises an ellipsoidal army of rhythms sketching abstractions in displacement. The shapes blur as the images weather down, an ellipse fading away into an ellipsis, concentricity disappearing into the simplicity of a dot. Described in tender parting tones, the aural deluge gradually recedes from the room's memory, and the silky stillness of daily reality hesitantly slithers into view, settling down into unmoving tranquility after a pearly odyssey into infinity, everything in its right place.

Scoop

Shadows crashing through dimensions.

Absent smiles drifting into metaphors.

A shapeless mist, a lenient emotion

slowly sinking into words.

Moments dragged out into devious tales.

Escapades tied in to conversant skies.

Sighs muted by their own voices

like eyes drowning in their own vision.

Lungs shrivelling into pea pods

like leaves in a withering gale.

Silences that dig into days

leaving heart shaped holes behind.

This is what you do.

And, how quaintly beautiful

and wonderfully sad it is,

that you don't seem to know it, yet.

In memory of an unmemorable afternoon

The mouse doesn't work so well, the cursor refuses to be bossed around the screen. The room's despicable messy, you wonder how anyone could live here. You don't want to listen to the song any more, but still can't bring yourself to change it. The mailbox is empty and lunch wasn't that interesting either. The sitcom's been on pause for a while now, and you let it stay that way. Milosz and Vargas Llosa lie silent by the dusty desk, frozen by inertia. That article about obscure Italian digestives trumps poetry this time.

The usual work's there to be done, along with the usual plans, but you don't feel like it. You don't feel like doing anything anybody in the world would expect you to do, even if that anybody is yourself. The most common and characteristic physiological response to all this is sleep, so you don't feel like that either. So you sit there on the bed, feet uniformly pressed into the cold floor, traversing those words in plastic, protesting silently against life's oppression.

Then something gets ticking. What if the afternoon refuses to be reined in? Maybe you could give in to it, and let it have whatever it sought from you. Why fight something when you could side with it?

Sing that song as loudly as you can, until your neighbour's forced to wonder what the hell's going on in the other room. Remember a stranger's face. If you can't, cook up one. Take that chronograph into your hands and count down the seconds. Twenty four, twenty five, twenty six... fifty eight, fifty nine, sixty/zero(???), one, two... twenty four, twenty five, twenty six... you get the idea. Take a paper and try to draw an 8x8 square grid with your eyes closed. Then darken alternate squares, like a chessboard. Preserve the results for posterity.

Stretch out this forgettable chunk of time on the pin board of memory and pin it down with the brightly coloured pins that are words, paint it with the flourescence of ennui, spruce it up with the scent of the day's heated shadows and burnish it with the air's repetitive sounds of music and there you have it, a vibrant piece of throbbing memory with an invisible watermark beneath that reads, I lived through this.

Sometimes life can be unmemorable.

But then, you can always make the memory livable.

I love the sound of

Wind trampled by rubber.

Television playing to empty furniture.

A stranger's knuckles rapping on the door.

Slushy feet in wet evening mud.

Tearing open an envelope to get to the letter inside it.

Muffled music from the neighbour's earphones.

A lie escaping the roof of a tongue.

Bunny slippers treading over pebbly hard earth.

The triumphant flick of the Enter button.

A fountain pen's cap snugly clicking into place.

A squeaky ceiling fan on a sweaty afternoon.

Static that accompanies outdated videotapes.

Rummaging through a brown cardboard box of childhood memories.

Periodic ticks of a grandfather's walking stick.

Attempts to discreetly fold candy wrap in a silent classroom.

Water queuing up in spirals to disappear down a drain.

A newborn's nails scratching the walls of a bassinet.

Drawing nines in the breeze.

A metallic fork sinking into chocolate pastry.

The unmindful taps of waiting feet.

A smile by the darkness of a moving window.

An anchor crashing into the tranquil sand of a sea bed.

Canvas

The room is ivory white, devoid of even a hint of furniture. The air is still, without a sense of movement, as if holding its breath in anticipation. The walls extend gracefully into the distance, like long lost friends. The ceiling and the floor seem to appear suddenly, as if from nowhere. Music flows, through dots chiselled into heavenly patterns in the air. On the floor, there is a tangled piece of black thread, an old crumpled postcard, a spool of brown tape, a child's colouring book, a broken pair of spectacles and a little wooden cube with dots carved into its faces.

They sit there sprawled on the floor, backs leant against each other, facing opposite directions. An ink bottle lies sideways on the ground beside them, its blue contents let loose onto the soft floor. He rolls words between his inky palms, tapping his feet lazily to a ground drifting in thought. Her eyes are closed, head tilted lingeringly towards the ceiling, the song's melody pirouetting on her tongue. Patches of inky blue adorn their clothing, as if drawing shapes to the tune of a waltzing zephyr. Memory paints itself into the distance, a peevish shadow creeping through a pale white darkness.

The artist steps back from the canvas, surrendering the tableau to existence. Wavy shapes that dissolve into the ivory emptiness of the room, like smudgy watercolour. A bird frozen on the threshold of a soaring flight, outstretched wings on the cusp of a cloudless horizon.

Note to Neruda

To think it took me this long to know you,

Pablo Neruda,

is to know how unjust time sometimes can be.

Fouettes

Things. With names.

Eyes. Seen through another's.

Dots. Splashed into patterns.

Dusty jeans. Tattered soles.

Voices hopscotching in space. Drafted into memory.

Years broken down into moments. Like rusty fences by a vanishing roadside.

Carved spaces. Elegant absurdities.

Fouettes for an epiphany.

A montage. Words.

An inaudible sigh.

I'm not here. I never was.

In Conversation

*. I love tonight's sky. May be the same as every night but as it peeps at me from behind a tree with streetlight tinting the leaves yellow, amid chaotic four-wheelers and traffic lights, I type this to you knowing full well there won't be another moment like this for all eternity. And that makes it worth a memory. [9:31 pm | 16th Feb, 09]

*. Chrome yellow chalk on a green board. Codes on a spreadsheet. A floating screen with boxes. And all I feel is Yorke's falsettos resonating in my soul. [10:59 am | 2nd Sep, 09]

*. We are carefree spirits, trapped more inside ourselves than the world that we live in. Only when we learn how to liberate our selves will we be able to learn what it means to be our true selves, to be what we truly are. Maybe then the world shall turn itself upside down, maybe all the wrongs shall right themselves, and we see everything for what it plainly is, not as a hindrance or an opportunity, not as a boon or a bane, but just for what it is, and learn to make something of it in life. [6:36 pm | 27th Mar, 09]

*. It's in moments like these that I feel the sea rise within me, trying to break away from its own waves, the very waves that constrain it, to be a seamless whole for a moment, only a moment, to stare back at the ever-changing world that created it, and be, just be. [11:23 pm | 13th Mar, 09]

*. A wiper erasing the traces of a rainy massacre on the windshield, a sky burning up in lament, a stranger's voice in the air, neon signs on a forehead. [6:37 pm | 17th Aug, 09]

*. ...that is what we are, a shifty smile carved into the lips of time, going around in shapeless circles, swaying to the wonders of existence. Like a paper boat on a rainy street, a little white sphere on a roulette, or a feather in a sandstorm. [11:23 pm | 22nd Aug, 09]

*. Can you see the clouds ganging up on the sun outside right now? One of those poignant moments nature always serves up in an uncannily bright texture that places it halfway between melancholy and brio, and leaves you unsure what to make of it in the end. [5:39 pm | 31st May, 09]

*. Sleepy words on the blog for the evening gone. Sleepier SMSes. An acoustic guitar plays to a raspy voice, and I'm stuck in a moment, swaying into a swirling dream. [3:16 am | 30th Aug, 09]

*. There is a white house in the distance. It is smiling. The shy evening is forgiving, leaves rustling to an invisible music. Here, now, beneath these red bricks of history, I am a dream, a river trapped in metal beneath a salty sky, a collective word waiting on the world's trembling lips. [7:02 pm | 8th Aug, 09]

Poem

Cloistered from the world by four walls of hazy white,
sinking into a light that devoured invisible air

burdened by all that went before it,
apprehensive of all that was to come after it

caught up in tangled ripples of memory,
teetering at the edge of obscurity

a moment screamed for its release,
and the poet obliged.