Antwerpen

After hours, the city looks largely uniform in its Flemishness, represented by buildings both old and new. On that overcast afternoon, for a glorious couple of hours, Antwerp did become the city of my imagination. As I spied the old men sipping Sagres in Espigueiro, a corner bar in the heart of the Portuguese barrio in Sint-Jansplein, the sun peeked out and the city-within-a-city project of the immigrant didn't seem so misguided anymore. I might have been in Lisbon. Like all great cities of the world, there are more beginnings than ends here.

Why I Read - IV

"When a man rides a long time he feels the desire for a city. Finally, he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories."

                                     - Italo Calvino (trans. William Weaver), Invisible Cities, at 7. 

Why I Read - III

"To be treated with the respect you aren't due is the dream of every talentless sportsman."

                                                                        - Marcus Berkmann, Rain Men, at 85.

Chasing Little Prizes - Since 2009

Another final played today. Another evening spent staring at my computer screen and alternatively, the ceiling, not really noticing them. A rather perceptive person put it beautifully today - our private faces know no restraint. Our public faces, no liberties. 4 years now. Still only 15 games played. Still only 17 goals scored. Still no final. Still no title. Want to know how to do it? Dig yourself a basketball-court sized hole, jump-in (don't spend a moment pondering talent/ability - just dream, dream, dream), gift yourself a tear of the medial meniscus, and don't climb out. Simple. 

Miss Green

You close your eyes when you feel its corrosive presence in your gullet, the sides of which you imagine chipping away, when all you want to do is retain some of it in your throat, feel the liquid accumulating around your Adam's apple so that to anyone on the outside, it looks like a clear, transparent patch that will stand out on your neck, making you the Shiva of Saligao, the Destroyer who remained unpoisoned, the neelkanth, the fenikanth. 

Feni and cunt. You open your eyes, and find yourself chuckling, like a drunk in a taverna, which you are. Destroyer who remained unpoisoned is far from the truth. Someone puts on a switch somewhere, and a bulb half-heartedly illumines the figure in front of you: a dense haired, wet-lipped apparition, but you notice only the freckles, which you have called (will now call for the last time) stains on the face of the moon. The Englishwoman is shaking gently, not yet undone by the liquid conductor of the opera this evening, this First World Parvati of yours, and the professional drunks of Saligao don't even look up as they go about their job with practiced ease.

In this life at least, you're a bellboy at the Taj property at Candolim. Too young to strut about like a fucking comprador, too old to think that you've never going to get out of Goa. You're attractive in a wolfish sort of way, the sort of way fellows like you are attractive to women like her. In one swift motion, she has locked the door of her room and pulled you towards her, attacking your lips with her own pink ones, even your teeth and an unprepared tongue. There is no time for you to wonder whether she had caught you staring at her heavy, dotted breasts, sticking out from under her summer dress, when she was in the lobby.  This was audacious even by the standards of a washed-up English woman who gets on a flight to this country within a country to get over a messy divorce. 

You've never had an older woman before, and are still reeling from the sex when she begins talking about herself. You see her hurtle towards what you know she considers her redemption, her second chance, and you say nothing even as you know that this deliverance might turn out to be her biggest folly yet. Hypnotized by the sight of her breasts straining against her t-shirts, and spoilt by the opportunity to free her of that yoke, at the very least, you begin to listen. Pressing your wiry frame against a rear that eats up, bit by bit, your capability for rational thought,  you become her dumb assistant as she decodes her sins, unhampered by red curtains and latticed windows. All the very well. Padre Lucius would not be pleased. 

It is monsoon. The only time of the year when Goa is for the Goans. When it doesn't matter whether anyone has left for Lisbon yet. Quem vio Goa excusa de ver Lisboa, they will say now. The awnings in Fontainhas drip throughout the day, and the sullen Mandovi looks like she has finally had enough of her reddish-brown burden. On the floor of the barge to Betim, you can make out the  brown imprints of the soles of the cheap, black sandals that the middle-aged women of this state have made a habit of wearing. Their black umbrellas tucked under their pudgy arms, they gossip about other people's sons or if they are not in the mood for chatter, try not to think about the day when their own boys will leave. While the Englishwoman buys her smokes, you try to avoid the gazes of the gaunt, old men that still carry the last dregs of a dream. In them, you see moth-eaten visions of the Bombay docks and the bottle-green jerseys of football clubs.

You pick up Sabby's bike from his little dugout on what has come to be known as the River Princess Street in Candolim, after the ghost-ship that lies forgotten in the sea a few metres away, daring scrawny, enthusiastic youths and pot-bellied men trying to spice up their marriages with a bit of holiday machismo to swim upto its wreck, despite the warnings of the occasional life-guards in garish red-and-yellow. You, in your local pride, hardly consider the wreckage to be an ennui dispeller, until that night when the Englishwoman drags you to the edge of the water at the witch hour, and you hear the waves breaking against its ominous, ghastly silhouette, untempered by any sort of illumination that the shacks on the shore provide when the sun makes an exit after its cameo performance. In the silence that follows, you feel the manic frothy foam accumulate around your ankles, tightening and loosening its grip around them, fists of the vast, vast ocean clenching and unclenching, undecided whether to take the fight to you or wait for you to forsake the shallows and wade in further. For the first time, you notice that the Englishwoman, in the four months she has been here, has gradually slayed the River Princesses of her own past - the vacuity of an unhappy marriage, a job as a low-level functionary in a firm managing hedge funds even as the creeping tendrils of the recession were growing into unruly, self-strangling vines, her spectacular failure as a writer in a previous avatar - not decapitating them with one smooth stroke of her Exacalibur called Goa, instead chipping away at them with it, eroding and discarding the past as only a change of air can. On the edge of the water that night, you understand how one can fall in love with a place through a person. Along with freshly-fried calamari, snatches of Konkani drifting in from next door at the rented accommodation in Anjuna and the gentle whistling of ancient, swaying palms in a ruined paradise, you have been totemized. Love is nothing if not a totem for a new lease of life. 

And so you ride with her on Sabby's bike to Morjim, as the monsoon peters out and an assertive sun calls out to the denizens of countries that colonized and liberated and re-colonized this place. This is it, you think. The endgame. Let the season begin, let the hordes in oversized yellow swimming shorts take over North Goa, and cause her to think of her admittedly long vacation as just that - an admittedly long vacation. You're not too worried about the people talking. Countless young men before you have tread down the same path - fooling around with white women until it is time for them to get on their flights to Riga or Birmingham or wherever it is they have to go to next. Everyone knows how these things end, and such idle chatter is just a way to fill up the hours, because a people need their intrigue, imagined or otherwise, whether it is Goa or Gangtok. How else can we justify the tyranny of never-ending afternoons and early evenings? The beginning of the tourist season will mark the end of the courtship and the beginning of the marriage you think will be her second failed one. But on that evening in the Greek's shack in Morjim, as you watch her with her head bent down, rolling another joint, you get the first signs that going back home is not very high on her list of things to do. She sits back crossed-legged, seemingly unperturbed by the attention she usually receives from the  city-based adolescents on their annual holidays, and imperiously inhales from the joint. Her eyelids droop for a brief moment, like they do when you rub the day-old stubble on your chin in her nether regions, before they open suddenly and she looks out on the sea again. 

You begin to feed off your own fear, revealing yourself to be colonized by flesh.  Not once do you indicate that you are uninterested in emotional involvement, fearing that an unequivocal rejection of her mind will cause an automatic relinquishment of flesh, for she is now a woman in love. As she absent-mindedly circles your bare chest while you smoke a cigarette, she whispers that she loves you. She does not demand reciprocal declarations, and now you do not know how to deal with the situation. The hunter has become the hunted. 

And so you find yourself in this taverna in Saligao, when you finally announce that you're getting engaged to Flavia next week, and boarding a train to Bombay next month, where you'll begin a journey to Africa that'll end with you posted as a cadet in an oil tanker off the Angolan coast. This is your fate, you tell her. There is no question of wanting to leave. Like generations of men before you, you have to. There seems to be no need to explain. She has had a lot to drink, but she has nothing to worry about for she is home. You ask her what she will do when you are engaged, and then gone. She smiles, and as if to confirm your suspicion she says that she will wait for monsoon to come again. 

(I've entered this for the Saraang Writing Awards 2013 - http://www.facebook.com/swa2013). 

Sailors When They Leave Land

One summer night, fingers came loose.

Like chess-pieces making unthinking moves.

In halogen shadow, it was our fin-de-siecle.

Our desire was pickled and put away

for its sour flavour to return when

things got too bland.

Our bodies speak a different language

They are totems of an age unlived.

There is economy in one pair of eyes

but our loins dream of excesses.

Like sailors when they leave land for

the sea again.

Again, we will drop anchor and walk our

walk down the pier to a place where they

will be able to tell that you think me a traitor

for filling you up with myself.

You Bring Out The Bambaiyya In Me

(Inspired, of course, by Sandra Cisneros' "You Bring Out The Mexican In Me" and the equally delightful "You Bring Out The UP-waali In Me". This one was written over the course of a couple of DPC classes more than six months ago. I've been encouraged to take the dust off the jacket after reading Spadika's beautiful Bengaluru version. Originally commissioned by Meghal Mehta - New York, London she will keep saying, but who'll come back to Bombay)

You bring out the Bambaiyya in me.
The October heat, the July downpour in me.
The rush of the 8:50 to Churchgate in me.
You are as spicy as bhel with extra theekha chutney,
As tangy as sev-puri with extra meetha chuntney.
You bring out the Bambaiyya in me.

On Juhu Beach, we will have gola made with mineral water,
We will eat vada-pav and you will say, "Boss, ek Coke dena."
You bring out the Bambaiyya in me.
The cricket at Shivaji Park in me,
The football at Azad Maidan in me.

Tonight, your dress is the red of a BEST,
Your necklace is nothing but the Queen's,
You light up like the screen at Metro,
You grumble like traffic jams on Link Road.

I hear you say, "Pude chala, maushi" as you enter the ladies compartment,
And I want to jump in, and get off only at VT,
Where we will take the subway and walk towards Fashion Street.
You bring out the Bambaiyya in me.

The bruch at the Trattoria in me.
The Pizza by the Bay in me.
Sandwich ice cream at Rustom in me.
You are my chavi, my item, my fataka,
I am you hero, your luchcha, your badmaash.
You bring out the Bambaiyya in me.

I will kiss you at the Gateway, and police uncle will run after us,
But we will slip into the streets of our Colaba,
Where your fresh lips will sip mosambi juice at Kailash Parbat,
And your friends will insist on brownies from Theo.

You bring out the Bambaiyya in me.
The 4 Ltd. to Fountain in me.
The itna paisa mein itnaich milenga in me.
The azaan echoing in Bhendi Bazaar in me.

Tonight, you are overwhelming my senses,
Like the phool bazaar under Dadar Flyover,
Like the swell of humanity on Mohammad Ali Road,
Like the madness of Crawford Market.
You shimmer and sizzle like pav on a tavaa.

Your eyes are shifting tonight, like the sands of the Aksa.
Yet, you hold my hand and take me to my peace.
Like the lanes of Bandra in me,
Like the softy at Matunga in me,
Like falooda at Badshah in me.

You bring out the Bambaiyya in me.
The Dalal Street in me,
The illusion of money in me,
The impossibility of love in me.

You are the flavour of ice-paan,
The taste of my growing up, the taste of my coming down.
You, chokri, are my latka, my matka, my jhatka,
Beacuse you bring out the Bambaiyya  in me.