Of Protracted Deaths

And so
we discussed at length
painless options,
procuring pills; ingenious whims
laughing at euthanistic prospects,
you pooh-poohing carrying out
mine
"if at all, it should be him..."
as we laughed some more;
both wanting him gone.

Lime pit is what we agreed upon.

What deliberation was it
to pick for mine
the most agonizing trick from
the stack
of protracted deaths?

"Koi?"

What brought the year to an end
came as the longest week

when the koi had forgotten to swim

upstream

to the Yellow River as is her wont,

unlocking the knotted love hung out to dry

Uncannily quiet, the week

came with motley sounds

of bikes whizzing past

dogs barking

clothes ruffling under the weight of hugs

and wafting notes from forgotten music

but not the proverbial fish

silent in its arrival

waking me up with an excess of vowels.

The year came to an end,

with the weight of the longest week in ages,

The weight of knowing she knows

What I forever feared,

but never knew.

The First Road Trip

___________________

Traveling on NICE corridor, if I roll down the windows while passing a slow truck, the steady drone of its nylon tyres on asphalt still brings back memories from childhood, of road trips all over India (by bus), baba and ma on either side. It started with Kashmir in 1975, when I was still hanging like a baby chimp from their hands, complaining of aching legs from all the walking, and went on till 1992, when we did Bandhavgarh in our uncle's Premier President (Fiat 1100). By then I was bold enough to walk with nothing but a sturdy twig in hand on to an oncoming tiger that kept roaring and approaching our huts, only to discover it was a bellowing ox returning home at twilight. Never been very fond of walking, however. That was probably the last trip with both of them. But today when I rolled down my window, I remembered my first journey by car. Not a taxi, an actual private car. 

Why roll down the window, you ask? Well, with diesel prices having touched Rs 100, I drive at 65-70 kmph on an expressway for optimal economy, without the airconditioning, worrying about my depleting reserves and how I can't afford a new petrol car anymore.  And then I see a bunch of laborers huddled together on a tractor returning home, at twilight, but not belligerent as the ox from Bandhavgarh. My worries melt, my privilege at being able to afford fuel for my car stings like a bee, as I quickly roll up the window and pretend not to see. I want to think of the lifespan of oxen. Just then the eyes of a little girl catch mine, and I roll down the window again and smile at her. She's going home too, with her laborer parents, who couldn't afford to hold her hand all day. Nestled in the lap of her mum, she smiles back, feeling as safe as I did hanging like a chimp. Nestled. Did you ever pronounce Nestlé as nestle? I didn't. I was taught not to ignore stressed vowels. The stress of remembering all that, I tell you, takes away all possible abandon from one's childhood.

That night my uncle and his friend came to take me from Durgapur to Dhanbad. Ma was already in Dhanbad, to participate in her younger brother's wedding, and I was supposed to go with baba a couple of days later. It was to be our first inter-city road trip by scooter, a distance of 130 km through non-existent roads of Bengal and Bihar (now Jharkhand). We had open helmets with goggles ready and faux leather jackets...but baba got hospitalized just a day before with acute chest pain. When my uncle and his friend came to pick me up in a black Ambassador, I was thrilled beyond belief. These men being senior cops, it was easy for them to arrange a meeting with my dad at the hospital late in the night, after which we took off. 

I couldn't believe I was traveling by car, and not a taxi. We couldn't afford taxi rides much, so even that was a luxury, but this was like a fairy tale come true. The entire rear seat was mine; I could choose to see anything on either side of the car. It was dark, the nylon on tarmac had a familiar buzz, as we crossed one truck after another. The lean, wiry uncle who was driving kept his loaded holster on the dash. 

Roll up the window, Shuvo, it's cold. 

But I never catch cold, don't you know? 

The weak halogen headlights seemed to fuse with the fog ahead in the cold night and I suddenly had the brilliant idea to ask them if they had fueled up. To this both of them laughed. Thanks for reminding, Shuvo. Eleven-year-old me felt mighty important that night, smugly looking out at the darkness and watching the even darker trees pass us by. They had acknowledged my clever idea after all! It was my first road trip, of which I have mostly olfactory memories of diesel fumes and nightly dust.

Rolling down the window and slowing down on a highway does have some benefits after all, and not all of it environmental.

Buttless

Mel Gibson has a "delicious butt," said some famous actor in a movie. It was quite brutal of her to mention it, considering she said this to Hugh Grant, who suffers from a severe emaciated derriere syndrome. Search for "Hugh Grant side profile body" and chances are you won't see his butt in any picture. That's because he doesn't have one to begin with. But who am I to mock him, for I have suffered a buttless existence for almost 50 years of my life. Rumor has it that I had a nice and shapely one while growing up, but years of cycling and motorcycling have compressed them into flatbread from buns or buttercups, with the pressure squeezing out all the yeast.

Another reason can be that I had butt envy for Bubun'da, who had the perfect glutes, from playing all the soccer that he did. Psychologists say butt envy is a real thing, where if your neighbor has a prominent one, your brain starts forgetting about your glutes and gets everything done by your lower back and thigh muscles instead. It is called gluteal amnesia, and believe me, am not making this up. 

After leaving Durgapur at 18, I thought I will meet other flatbread men, but as luck would have it, I ran into Arup Sarkar and the butt envy continued for another painful five years. His brain hadn't forgotten his glutes, and kept them well cushioned for some unfair reason unknown to me. 

However, with my fiftieth birthday coming up in six months, I thought of gifting myself a beach bod, and work toward shedding some flab and gaining some muscle mass. Like all Indian men with beefed up bodies and skinny legs, I have the same problem. I worked out my upper body, and ignored the lower. And I have a theory for why Indian men have historically ignored their lower bodies. 

Mirrors.

Yes, mirrors. Let me tell you why.

Remember how in the fifties we had only pale North Indian heroes in Bollywood? It didn't matter if they were extremely obese or had spindly limbs, as long as they were fair and wore lipstick. That is because in India, what was perceived as male hotness evolved with the economy. In the India of the yore, a mirror was synonymous with a small shaving mirror. You could only see your face, and as long as you had access to lipstick and face powder, you were covered.  

As the economy progressed, and the cost of sticking mercury behind glass came down, Indians could afford half mirrors, and we started seeing heroes like Sunny Deol and Anil Kapoor, hirsute as fuck, who dared to come out shirtless. By now Indian men could see half of their bodies and were vigorously working on their pectorals. Had it not been for all that chest hair, some of them could have been mistaken for generously endowed Bavarian women. 

Suddenly, probably around the time when Dr Manmohan Singh was the Finance Minister and opened up the economy, full-length mirrors became a thing. We could finally see how we looked under those baggy pants. And believe me, it wasn't a pleasant sight at all. We had biceps and no triceps, because heroes in films are shown to work only on their biceps with dumbbells. And we had no thighs, butts, or calves at all. All that cycling, mind you, had had NO effect at all. 

By then my butt envy had turned toward women, and I had no time to work on mine any more. If you don't have one, go after one, was the general idea. 

However, three decades later as I now want to work out my glutes and bring them back to shape, I have nobody to turn to but Arindam Mukherjee, who's not only an expert on geopolitics, but also an avid body builder. "But I'm right wing," he said, "what if I mislead you? Why don't you ask some of the comrades instead?" This butt politics was getting murky and I couldn't possibly have asked Kim Jong Un for tips on working out my lower half, could I?

The only option left was to remind my brain to have a conversation with my butt. So I started with "Hey you up there, careful with the 100 dollar bill am holding between my butt cheeks."

And the brain replied, "Eff off you miserable Indian, that's more than your entire life's savings. Have you even seen a one-dollar bill?"

There went my plan!

Now all you can do is accept me as I am when I turn 50.

The Wisdom of Wheat Flour

Ma had poured a lot of wheat flour in that round vessel. 

Usually it was Maya'di who did all the cooking, but when all the siblings came visiting their mother with their families, she alone couldn't manage in that kitchen with the huge earthen oven that ran all day long. My mother and some other aunts used to help her. The oven was about five feet in width with two outlets at the top, and you had to stoke the coal from outside. You could cook two dishes at the same time, which was a novelty for us. And it was at knee level, so all the cooking had to be done sitting.

After a hard day's work, when the huge earthen contraption was drowsy, with the embers letting out an orange glow from its bowels, Darling and Betty would want to retire in the vicinity, to catch the residual warmth. Sometimes I used to go sit with the dogs, but they didn't think much of me. 

The kitchen was at the back of the bungalow, and was an open one. The dogs roamed free all night, and had access all around the bungalow. My grandma lived alone, with Maya'di the cook, and Sundar the watchman. Out of her five children, one stayed with her, but he too was busy all day. Hence the dogs. If one died, it was usually replaced by another Alsatian pup. And when it was time for the annual meet, the bungalow bustled with a lot of activity. The Australian cousins would love to explore the village, try to speak Bengali with us, the ones from Madhya Pradesh would converse in Hindi, and some of us from Bengal would try to keep up with our broken English and absolutely pedestrian Hindi. The four brothers and the sister (Ma) were mostly reticent people, hardly communicative or expressive, but not lacking warmth. 

One evening I was sitting with her at the kitchen, watching her knead the dough for rotis. 

“How do you know how much flour to use?” I was always curious. We needed rotis for almost 15 people, so the math always eluded me. How did she know?

“It’s always a smart guess, you can say. You can’t always be exact. Sometimes there’s extra and sometimes there’s a little short. It is much like every chance you take in life, you make an educated guess and go for it. There’s no telling how it will turn out to be. But there are always workarounds. Be it for kneading dough, or for something in life.” I wasn’t really curious about life lessons at the point in time, so I didn’t read her wan smile. “Our neighbors, Runu pishi? They used to take me to knead the dough every time they had guests over, because I am an expert in this.”

“But you don’t like to cook, do you?” I knew she hated the heat of the oven and disliked entering the kitchen. We’ve always had someone else cook for us back home in Durgapur. I hated the fact that she had to manage when the cook didn’t show up, but there was little I could do to help. I could chop vegetables, shell the peas from their pods, beat the eggs, and when we all went to our Grandmom’s place in Dhanbad, I tried my hand at drawing water from the well but never succeeded, with the weight of the laden metal bucket dragging me to the edge every time. I also loved to watch Sundar unload bags of coal into the oven’s mouth early in the morning. I offered to take the dogs out, and got dragged everywhere by the beasts, but I never let go. The metal rings of the chains would sometimes make deep marks in my palms. I went with Sundar to fetch fresh, foamy milk from the nearby buffalo shed. When Ma had to cook, I tried to help however I could, but couldn’t fathom why it is the woman who has to take up this responsibility. There were other aunts who loved to cook delicacies, and took pride in it, but I hated the fact that it was always the woman. “Why doesn’t Baba cook?”

“No, let him not try. We might have to go hungry even if he attempts to.” My dad used to vehemently insist that he too could cook, but then we knew he wasn’t any good at it. He was busy collecting accolades for his collection of books, for being able to hold lengthy discourses about world politics and history, playing the violin, solving others’ problems, helping others with their assignments, etc. To the rest of the world he was a hero. A feminist, a socialist, talking animatedly about Joan of Arc, Eisenstein, Tagore, Ray, or M.N. Roy’s radical humanism. But the woman had to cook. I often wonder how he managed for ten years after Ma passed, but when I saw him in the kitchen all by himself, he was busy with his imaginary conversations. He was never alone. Ma was. 

“You know I can manage with a roti and some boiled veggies. It is for you and your dad that we have to have elaborate food arrangements. And I don’t need more than one little cot. Have you seen the little green table fan? That was all I needed. I can’t stand the summers. Sometimes I wonder if this institution of marriage makes any sense at all.”

Then she went on to tell me how she never wanted to marry, but wanted to work at a museum after her PG in Anthropology. But opportunities were difficult to come by, and she ended up teaching. “Marriage is usually the end of the road for dreamers.” I grew up believing it, but when the time came to look for a profession, I first thought of joining St Edmund’s College for Congregation of Christian Brothers in Shillong. Ujjwal Routhe had told me how they get paid a fat sum, and all you had to do was believe. But I realized I cannot be a priest ever, because I wanted to sin. The fact that I wanted to commit it repeatedly wasn’t so clear in my mind then, but I needed the company of a woman. A Brother there couldn’t marry ever, and having grown up as an atheist, it really made no sense to suddenly turn a Christian. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find a place for God in my life. Like I could never decide on which tattoo to go for, I couldn’t decide on a religion when there was a choice. "Become a Buddhist if you really need to belong. Forget it otherwise," came the bored answer.

“But then you wouldn’t have had me, if you never got married, isn’t it?” I was baffled. 

“No. But then I never wanted a child either. You’ve been a nice kid, didn’t trouble me much, and I do love you, but it is a superfluous thing to have a child. Like an appendage you don’t want. Your dad has a lot of expectations from you. But I don’t know how you will turn out to be. You seem to be doing fine, so far.” 

There were exactly 60 rotis at the end of the conversation. And when in between all this she sang mellifluous songs by Tagore, my uncles quietly got up from their living room conversations and came to sit behind us, listening. As a kid, I had already seen through the soullessness of the violin back home. But her singing never got its due.

When much later in life she met my girlfriend, she told her the same thing. “Don’t get married, dear. Live in. These guys are everybody’s and never your own. The day you want, you can opt out.” By “these guys” she meant boys in our family in particular, I have a sneaky feeling. “Always be financially independent. And if possible, don’t burden yourself with a kid.”

The concept of living in was new in the nineties, and although urban Indians had already been practicing it, it wasn’t a trend that caught on with the middle-class as much. “Don’t do it in Benares. People won’t understand you there. Might even burn you at the stake, for all you know. Live in here, in Calcutta. But then Calcutta has no opportunities for you. Move to Delhi.”

Move to Delhi we did, but we couldn’t do justice to the wisdom she passed on. Today when I help at the kitchen and knead the dough, am always confident, though. Don’t worry if there will be a little extra or a little short, just take a guess and go for it. Life will sort itself out.