Throwaway thought

If I were to persist imagining my parents young, I would cry. I'm not sure why. Perhaps because I wouldn't know how to continue being taken care of, perhaps because my own knowledge that this youth is ephemeral would solidify. And just maybe because it would make me feel their loss like my own. All that spring sunshine. I would wonder what became of it. And I wouldn't know. And I would look at the remarkable equanimity with which they seem to have handled the passage of time. And I would grieve for them. And wonder why they didn't hold onto that time when their child was little and their world large. With the arrogance of youth I would feel a sorrow they may or may not have. And impose on them the soon to be thwarted ambitions of my own immortality. But most of all, it would make me painfully aware that time is fleeting. And mine will be up as will that of everybody I know. And none of it ought to be unfelt. 

Life perched on a string of unrelated sentences and disjointed pictures

Good cheer comes unbidden. I have a potent combination of coconut oil and honey in my hair; while this may seem like an unseemly unguent, it isn't. Yesterday, I managed to read half a novel in one day and I'm not entirely unhappy at my inability to be continuous. Once upon a not so long ago, I used to be able to read a novel a day.

I have had coffee, not any coffee but my mother's magical filter coffee. This coffee sings. It makes one happy. It makes one smell things more particularly, more spectacularly. Also, my father cuts me fruit. These acts of infinite kindness that make possible coffee and fruit make me very happy.

Travel has become part of life. It seems to ask for nothing in return, except movement. And I'm a fan of continuous movement. After all, focused thought is a luxurious commodity and I am nothing if not a creature of rare luxury. So, in its lieu, I substitute movement. In the service of such movement, I have been back and forth between cities, and precincts, and spaces, and places. I am now slightly tired. 

In the middle of one unfinished novel, one un-thought book, one incomplete ethnography, one unwritten blog post, one un-purchased air conditioner, one head of un-styled hair, one suitcase of unpacked goods, one case of unpolished shoes, one mass of un-filled forms, and one drawer of unclaimed bills, I seek completeness.

Things feel differently when I try to write them down. Turquoise nails looks turquoise-ier, landscapes sit calmer, noise sounds un-noised. The world looks tamer, and within reach.

 

This month, I will buy myself a writing desk.  And write myself a life in sentences of mesmerizing beauty.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough. 

— Ezra Pound

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012
© Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Some Fill With Each Good Rain 

There are different wells within your heart.
Some fill with each good rain,
Others are far too deep for that.

In one well
You have just a few precious cups of water,

That “love” is literally something of yourself,
It can grow as slow as a diamond
If it is lost.

Your love
Should never be offered to the mouth of a
Stranger,

Only to someone

Who has the valor and daring
To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife

Then weave them into a blanket
To protect you. 

There are different wells within us.
Some fill with each good rain,

Others are far, far too deep
For that.

-- Hafiz. Translated by Daniel Ladinsky (1999). The Gift.

Notes from Thanjavur

The family insists on calling it Tanjore. Don’t ask me why. This is also why they refer to dance in the American accent and Hydra-bad as in the bad-assness of the mythical figure. So the family and I went to Tanjore. Or Thanjavur. The ancient seat of the medieval kingdoms of the Pandyas, the Vijayanagar Sangama Dynasty, the Madurai Nayaks, the Thanjavur Nayaks, and the Thanjavur Marathas.  Except for the last, the first set were treated rather shabbily in my history textbooks prescribed by the Maharashtra state education board. Maharashtra is in western India. The Northerners think Southerners reside there. The Maharashtrian state government disagrees. And so they take their ire out on the ancient Southern empires. Or some such. I digress.

So Thanjavur yes, and Kumbakonam, yes. The family was coerced into vacationing. My good and dutiful family members, possessiong abundant Protestant ethics that they know not of, do not approve of pointless vacationing. They visit relatives. Whereas I do the opposite. Now that we live in the same country, I fight for my will to prevail. So I coaxed them into hauling selves from Bombay to Madras to come travel with me. They got here, booked tickets, and boarded the train. As for me? Well, I almost missed the train.

The rickshaw driver who I muttered sleepily to and asked if he would care to take me to Egmore railway station assumed I said I wanted to go to the airport. So I dozed in the back and he chugged his merry way in the opposite direction of Egmore. I woke up even as I spied signs that said “Airport” pointing us ominously in the direction of said chugging. I freaked. We both then had the brilliant idea of dropping me off at the airport railway station so I could beat traffic and move in the opposite direction. He snidely remarked as I disembarked that my jacket seemed to suggest that I was headed to the airport.

So I made it. The parents giggled. Alright, guffawed.  

Half a day of eating, sleeping, and climbing up and down from the three storey train berths later, we arrived at Kumbakonam. Have I mentioned how much I love train travel? Some other time then.

At Kumbakonam we made our way to the strangely named Raya’s (half of Royal? Krishnadeva’s better half? Okay sorry), a hotel bang in the middle of the town of Kumbakonam with snazzy, shiny, interiors, lots of God pictures and a neon inundated façade.

The rooms were clean, the coffee fantastic, and the tourism services fascinatingly efficient. This is the pamphlet they supplied us with as soon as we checked in….

Lord Almighty, we were in God country.

Now for those of you who may be acquainted with my complicated relationship with God with a capital G, and Hinduism with a capital H, I need say nothing. But for the rest of you, I will. I consider myself mostly agnostic, but I have a nostalgic, affective, and intensely calming relationship with ritual. It keeps me safe. The memory of a little-r me traipsing temples holding the grandfather’s hand as he spun stories about trees, and Krishna, and Nachiket, and asuras, and Shiva keeps me warm on many a godless night. But the attendant memories of gendering, of paunchy priests pushing my mother aside, and my father sneering at the godlessness of a god-filled country make this a schizophrenic warmth. So here we were, in the middle of a place guaranteed to send me spinning into existential crisis. So I did the next best thing. I became strategically essentialist. I bought into it. All of it.

We visited sixteen temples in two and  a half days. I would have seen more. The family got tired.

We saw or rather, if one must recognize properly the hierarchy of gaze, we showed ourselves to Anchaniyars, and Shivas, and Perumals, and Karthikeyas, and Kalis, and a lone Moon God. The Nayanars saw us and so did the Alwars. Durgas and Vishnus deigned to throw us sideway glances. We were blessed by elephants. We clicked our fingers to indicate attendance to Chandikeswara. It is believed that Chandikeswara is the official record keeper. But being in a state of deep meditation, he apparently does not register selfsame attendance. Hence the finger clicking. Bureaucracy clearly has divine roots.

We bowed and prayed and anointed ourselves with vibhuti, and kumkum, and manjal. White, red, yellow all over, we reminded ourselves of death, and life, and desire, and craving, and yearning, and sorrow, and calm, and cruelty, and doubt, and dread. We went through the motions. Even as things went through us.

There was no catharsis. There was merely the fact of distraction, also the fact of a different everyday life. But it was all rather nice.  And also a reminder of the muscle memory of ritual. I bobbed up and down as if I had been doing it all my life (I had, for some of it at least). For half a moment, I had an outside glimpse of a different self. And was reassured of the persistence of difference. Even within self.

We stood in line to gaze at idols that had been there since the 10th and 11th centuries, some of them erected to commemorate war, bloodshed, and victory. The architecture as expected was glorious.

The Chola kings were aesthetes and competitive ones at that. Look up the story of the Brihadeeswara temple at Thanjavur in relation to that of the one at Gangaikondacholapuram. Masculinity and the Oedipus complex are apparently never out of fashion. We were also shoved out of line by very devoted devotees, who did not really contemplate the consequences of behaving badly to your fellow beings even as they pushed their way to the sanctum sanctorum to ask for grace. 

Thanjavur used to, even until recent times, be an abundantly prosperous region on the banks of the Cauvery and is known to date as the rice bowl of the region. People who visited thirty years ago, remember the Cauvery steaming and flooding over. Now it’s a sandy bed that is regularly excavated by trucks a thousand strong corralled in the service of future monuments.Ugly ones at that.

For two days, I sort of believed. For two days, I was given an inner window into a life of focused and determined hope and desire. It was interesting, in a good way. A friend of mine once lamented the loss of certain worlds the moment one becomes secular or God-denying. How one can no longer hear the language of the world sans cynicism or critique. It was not the loss of faith that bothered him, but the loss of a world. And for a few days, I inhabited that world. And was rather taken in by its completeness. Much like I am taken in by the completeness of other worlds. Like family, and gated complexes, and offices, and colonies.  But then, this is the problem with a world that promises to be complete. It isn’t. And one has to leave.

On the last day, we visited our only secular monument, the house of Srinivasa Ramanujan. The one who claimed that he solved mathematical equations by the grace of the Goddess who appeared to him in his sleep.  

And this is all I can tell you today about truth, beauty, and faith. 

Shop Talk: The First Ten Updates of 2013

Friends afar, I am now thinking that this blog, ought to stop writing and start working. On maintaining the connections it already bears.  This living in multiple countries has its advantages and the ever growing loving brood of friends that you are, are much missed and thought about. But I don't know enough. So please use this column to keep me informed about your lives, and loves, and strange adventures.

As I will, you about mine. So here we go.

(a) I now live in Chennai, India, a city that used to be known as Madras, India. I teach at the Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Oh, for those of you who haven't been paying attention, I'm by training and loyalty beholden to anthropology. Those of my ilk do things like this.

My campus was carved out of the former Guindy National Park and is three degrees cooler than the rest of Madras, which is not saying much considering that our three seasons bear the names "hot", "hotter", "hottest". If you are ever in these parts, holler, come visit, come stay. For those interested, my Institute does have the possibility of providing room,board, an office, and an internet connection should you wish to enjoy a sabbatical or a writing stint in these southern environs. My stellar company is gratis.

(b) If you want to get geekier and probe further into the history of the hallowed halls I inhabit, Ajantha Subramanian is working on a manuscript tentatively entitled "Gifted: Articulating Knowledge and Value in Indian Technical Education" that asks how "colonial legacies structure postcolonial technical education in India and the diasporic trajectories of technical professionals." I heard her speak about this work at the University of Wisconsin, Madison over the Spring of 2012 and found the research both intriguing and compelling. For those already acquainted with the illustrious/nefarious value of an IIT education, do read Shiv Vishvanathan use it as an example of everything that demolishes the "Dreams of Childhood".

(c) My postdoctoral project is now a manuscript titled 1-800 Worlds: The Making of the Indian Middle-Classes. It is being circulated and prepped as we speak. Some parts of this work can be found here and here. Excerpt/ review here. For those interested in call centers, outsourcing, subjectivity, bodies, sexuality, criminality (the works), some books I would recommend would be Reena Patel's "Working the Night Shift", Shehzaad Nadeem's "Dead Ringers", and Kiran Mirchandani's "Phone Clones". Do share your views if you have read any of the above.

(d) I am being a fly on the wall for a new project just begun by my dear friends at Evam that will (fingers crossed) be performed this summer. For more information, watch this space. For now, suffice to say, it is interesting, political, provocative, and well, interesting. I had earlier worked perfunctorily with them for a small and terribly cute short film that asked young children about the meaning of life. Yes, deep, I know.

(e) On the home front, I have a new apartment, my roommate has a new puppy, and I bought some period furniture. The process of searching for said furniture was much more exciting than its actual procurement. I lost my heart to countless wardrobes, and numerous chairs. Yes, I'm a materialist like that. But actually, let me amend that. What I am is a nostalgist. I like the affect and the feel of a different time than this, always, and the past-er, the better. Go on, take a look.

And I tell myself  that I would be a stellar author if only I had the right furniture. But that aside, I did write on benches such as these in a remote school in a rural corner of Maharashtra. Ah Toto, Kansas is long gone. 

This was in the warehouse of a large furniture store in Pondicherry or Puducherry that specializes in restoring and selling colonial furniture from the 19th and 20th century. Hundreds and hundreds of pieces ranging from the slightly damaged to the wholly termite-eaten sit forlorn, and wait for an unforgiving market to deem them worthy of redemption.  

And yes, I am being overly dramatic. But there is something slightly melancholic about the search for forgotten furniture. Reminds of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books from Carlos Ruis Zafon's "Shadow of the Wind". Sometimes, objects have so much more romance than people. 

And one last. 

(f) Over the past few months, I have been able to catch three new bands in Chennai. So quick shoutout. 

-- Bindhumalini and Vedanth, who I saw perform some of my favorite Kabir bhajans from their album Suno Bhai. Lovely, robust voices both. My favorite rendition however remains this one. 

-- And although, we went to the basement production of the Chennai IndieFest 2012 to watch Peter Cat Recording Company, we ended up catching the last act of Bombay favorites, Something Relevant. Absolutely sparkling.

(g) Onto the next agenda item: books. My new bookshelves await Amruta Patil's "Adi Parva", Naresh Fernandes' "Taj mahal Foxtrot", and Matthew Wolf-Meyer's "The Slumbering Masses". Also, so excited to possibly teach my dear friends Nick and Chris' book "The World of Wal-Mart" sometime in the near future; am working on getting myself a copy. In hand; Teju Cole's "Open City", a book I have been waiting to read for a while and one that has already made a promising start, the long awaited Junot Diaz cracker "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao", and Heidegger's "Being and Time". The last one, don't ask. It is my problem child project of the year. And on related fronts, how I love Blossom Book House.

(h) On exciting fronts, I ended the year by taking a trip to Hampi, capital and pride and joy of the Vijayanagara empire from 1336 to 1565, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The details of this fabulous little sojourn will have to wait, but until then here are a few pictures. Also, we stayed at a wonderful little heritage resort called Peshegaar in the village of Anegundi across the Tungabhadra river. This entailed magical logistics such as transporting our Super Heavy Duty XL mopeds on boats every morning and returning dusty and hatless every evening to catch the last boat at 5 pm. Sheer adult magic. Hampi itself is magnficent, even if crowded and overrun. The trip afforded many ruinous delights including endless food and drink. We were entertained by Bollywood dancers, American tourists on banana lassi overdose, and podgy old men stalking us on our mopeds. My companions claimed the latter was because of my fedora. For said fedora, please see reference below. 

 Anegundi by evening at the "golden hour"

 Innumerable tanks dot the Hampi heritage site. Some of them bear water. Such as this one. 

Oh, Yashoda drank from here.

 This is probably the Chariot temple compound.

 Banana plantations waved us by on our not-so-secret canal route at the end of which awaited hot breakfast in a tiny little hut run by Anjali and her husband. 

Best breakfast ever.

Moped, fedora, etc.

(i) And lastly, in the manner of the South Madras neighborhood I now inhabit, do tell, havaayu? My email inbox, my comments section, my facebook page, my twitter even, all await with bated breath the gory details of your secret and candid lives. I repeat, do tell.