The Table Art
“Impossible is possible”, this was the line scribbled alongside a quirky remark about life and girlfriends and how they both sucked and an almost defaced, probably by a jealous lover “Kiran loves Shobhana”, there were several others as well love notes, phone numbers and lots of names, all scribbled across the desk I was sitting. The drudgery of endless classes and lectures could transform a simple student into an artist, I wondered as I thought about the school days when almost each of us wrote our names as well as the name of the girl we had a crush on, all inside a tinny weenie heart across each and every desk in the class, perhaps we thought scribbling or engraving our name across the desk would reserve for us a place somewhere in the memories of people, it was like immortality was just a stroke of scissor away. I as a matter of fact never got to do that because I always had a strong predilection towards falling in love with the girl sitting next to me and writing her name alongside mine, much more than tacky felt dangerous because what if the girl read it and complaint to the teacher. So more often than all through the childhood and as well as a greater part of adulthood, my love went unrequited more so because of my propensity of losing the people whom I loved the most in life and partly because I feel love is about happiness and keeping your beloved happy and I think people are happy without me being a part of their lives. Our class room desk weren’t the only place where this war for immortality was being fought because all we needed was a pen or a compass and then almost every empty wall felt like an empty canvas waiting for our master touch, so even the walls of our school toilet were filled with endless testaments about an undying love to an extent that my school people have to tile the restroom walls ceiling to floor but who so ever came up with that idea perhaps has never heard of a thing known as permanent marker and pretty soon the walls were once again painted in black, red and green albeit this time it was the name of our principle along with vituperations in seven different languages that was scribbled to the depths of infamy.
When I was a kid I remember engraving, much to the dismay of my mother for I used her favorite scissors, the names of all my friends along the bark of our garden tree, the names are still there but that insouciance is now long gone leaving behind just a remembrance etched somewhere along the bends and corner of our minds. One place that I tried but could never leave my mark was the Delhi metro, compass, coins, scissors, nails or keys all redundant against god knows what resistant paint, though that didn’t stop us from using markers and crayons but the cleaning staff was so damn efficient that not even a single mark survived of our delinquencies but this summer while commuting I found the spot where my girlfriend once scribbled our names in the space between the backrest of the seat and the compartment walls. The heart and the name was all effaced like the last remnant of our relationship and as I ran my hand across the emptiness where once her name had been, I wished for a worm hole to suck and take me to the time when we sitting huddled together have tried to immortalize our love, one thing for sure that permanent marker was a damn good one for its ink after all this year’s refuses to fade at least from the tomb stone of my heart, something’s you just can’t leave behind especially the engravings and scribbling along our palms and forehead, itched by the treacherous hands of fate.
A Simple Little Thing Called Love
Love is like the most amazing of all things, more so because the way it hits you right across your face and makes a blabbering idiot out of even the most impervious of us, is a feat which nothing else, with a probable exception of alcohol, could ever match. I think much more than anything it is our heart which deserves the credit for beating or skipping a beat or two at just all the right moments and with just all the right persons and still being able to pump blood like clockwork, really what an amazing pumping organ our heart is. Well, they just won’t call something the seat of human soul for nothing but this entire litany regarding heart and it’s mysteries notwithstanding, I sometimes wonder if any of us actually get to know what love is or is that we simply go onto accept whatever definitions that have been given for it so far? Well one thing that I have learnt about love is, the amount of grey in your hairs is rarely of any consequence when it comes to these matters of heart because very few of us are actually left with any hairs owing to this global market slowdown and perhaps also because once we start to grow with our life we become like bundles of accumulated histories, overflowing with our knowledge about everything which doesn’t work and everything that isn’t love that sometimes we end up complicating what happens to be the simplest of all emotions.
Remember the time when we were young and would fall in love so easily and at that instant all that mattered was being in love because being in love seemed to be all the more meaningful and believing in love seemed to all the more believable. Talking of childhood, I remember my friend telling me about her belief that kids like chicken hatched from eggs and hers was a dancing egg because she used to dance quite a lot. She did went onto hold this belief right up till eight grade when probably a health education book got better of her but nevertheless it was easier for her to believe because her theory was so simple as compared to my belief that kids were dropped from heaven straight into a hospital yard with parachutes tied at their backs. Clearly it didn’t took long for my theory to go bust more so because my mom failed to produce the parachute that I came with and really with the amount of preconditions and incredibility that like fine print were attached with my belief it was like a pile of dry leaves, waiting for a wind to blow it away.
This is exactly what we all do to love, we never let it be, we just go on to complicate or I dare say pollute love with all our inhibitions and beliefs or unbelief’s. I just can’t understand mankind’s obsession with untangling everything, why can’t just we accept something’s which are beyond us? I know to think is one of the most fundamental of human prerogative but there are times when you have to let things be for you are only acting as a deterrent by exercising your brain cells but if had it been this easy to detach this jelly inside our head, we for sure would have had a lot to live for in this life.
Finally, given my ignorance and the fact that my college has been closed, I could still feel a preponderance of love in each of the breath I take so much so that I am beginning to wonder if the air around our town has actually gone cleaner but then isn’t it what that happens each year right around this time. I think St. Valentine couldn’t have chosen a better time to die or whatever that he did and really valentine’s day or otherwise it would do all of us a lot of good if we could let that beating and pumping organ decide for us.
The Games That I Played
Childhood for me has always been synonymous with bruised knees and elbows and an occasional chipped tooth and broken ankle though I was a big time couch potato, watching almost every other movie on our dear old Doordarshan while guzzling copious amount of biscuits dipped in tea but nevertheless I was a restless kid, running hither and thither, pedaling and more often than not pushing my bicycle around the serpentine streets of our locality, playing and always inventing some new and equally unplayable games like the one which I christened to be The Grass Race wherein you have to cover a distance on your bellies and that too in our park which with foliage thicker than Amazon resembled a wildlife reserve. Well, my dream of taking my little games to an Olympian height never actually took off; more so because one of my friends got bitten by a snake and another got overrun by a herd of sprinting pigtailed girls and owing to this and similar incidents the association of stay at home moms (which according to my mothers was a nexus of abeyant and fat ladies who knew nothing better than to pickle mangoes and plan for there kitty parties) banished their kids (who were, again according to my mother, butt ugly) from playing with me but then I was the kid with the Cricket Bat and a Soccer Ball, so in the end I always got to not only play but also lead my own team and I don’t remember anyone having any problems with that because it was either this or snooping around some construction site and playing hide and seek or making sandcastles for those poor kids. Come to think of it, childhood’s a bitch because the neighborhood kid with all the nice toys and a Playstation always happen to be the one you aren’t allowed to play with and luckily for me, I was that kid.
I never made many friends though more so because there weren’t that many kids around, just a bunch of us brown, freckled and scrawny kids, zooming around the sidewalks in our shorts or half-pants, playing our own version of baseball with a cricket bat and tennis ball with an utter disdain for the streetlights and neighborhood windows. The auntie whose living room windows always lay along the descending trajectory of our tennis ball was the one who always dreamt of tying us all to that eucalyptus tree and having her way. She sadly never got her heart desire because pretty soon our park which was more of an empty plot was barricaded on all sides erecting a wall between reality and a childhood dream of playing into a glorious sunset.
That was the end of my lackadaisical sports career and also the starting of a phase that was marked with a string of failures as I dabbled, trying to find a perfect sport for me. I loved cricket but only till I was the one yielding the bat, my efforts at fielding and bowling left everything to be desired more so because I never believed in stopping or catching anything if it wasn’t directly coming towards me but then there were always some desperate times which always called for desperate measures, so I not only quite often found myself in the team but got to bowl as well and just before I was given the ball my captain always whispered to the batsman to try and keep the runs under 20. I played a bit of basketball as well but as every other kid grew up, my coach who was the only one to see through my pencil legs and wrists asked me play along with the girls in the school team and since when you play with girls basket ball is the last of all bouncy thing that you want to concentrate on, I never could make my name in the basketball and the world missed its next Michael Jordan. Failures never deterred me and I just moved on from one sport to another but then everything has to come to an end and my love for Martina Hingis proved to be my nemesis for as I watched the blood oozing out from my bruised knees and my ankle as it turned a deepest shade of purple I realized that the hard cemented floor of our badminton court was meant for just one thing, morning assembly and prayer service. I finally decided to call it quit, choosing a less illustrious and an unsweaty path with nerdy guys and pigtailed fat girls standing on the sidewalk as I rode myself to an awkward and zit ridden adulthood.
Games simply stopped being fun for me since then, hard to find fun in your ineptitude I guess, and I finally settled for playing far more subtle games, the ones that you play within the realms of your mind and I bet had there been an Olympic for these, I would have sure won another Gold Medal for my beloved motherland.
Amby-The Car
I remember when I was a kid, my father used to have this 1989 Ambassador, an old, dilapidated, recalcitrant piece of junk metal, painted the darkest shade of black which owing to incessant rain and crow droppings appeared more grey than black. It was my father’s sweetheart or this was what my mom used to say on those long and sultry Sunday afternoon’s when my father would disappear for hours and using unscrupulous amount of water and car wash give his beloved Amby her weekly wash. There used to be fish in the nearby lake but they all died and I wonder if these weekly ablutions have anything to do with it. Each and every corner of the car was scrubbed, even the underside and after all this washing was over my father would take out our almost coeval and antediluvian vacuum cleaner and clean the innards which still smelt of popcorns or spilled cola from our last excursions. My father would then walk back into the house with his head held high like a victorious gladiator, dripping water and suds all over the living floor much to the dismay of my mother. My mother would make me put on my best clothes and holding tightly to my face move the comb through my hairs and side part them. She used to put on her best sari, put a bindi with intricate patterns on her forehead, dab a bit of Chanel no 5 and all this while my father would be pacing up down across the drive way, with his black Bata shoes gleaming against the fading sunlight, complaining about my mother’s dressing antics. We would all get into the car, with my father in the driving seat and me and my mother on the back seat, sometimes my mother would sit with my father in the front leaving me to play with my teddies and GI-Joe’s and the car would make all sorts of grueling noises and my father would then get down and pop his head inside the hood and pull on a few wires, give the carburetor a tap and ask my mother to turn on the ignition and almost always the car would start, dispelling a cloud of black smoke and destroying whatever green and alive happened to lie in its path. The way my father used to handle that thing, I wondered if he could have made mummies do an arabesque. My father would return to his seat all smug and pull on the gear lever and we all we move at an elephantine pace towards the Chowk bazaar and then my father would park the car in front of our favorite Chaat corner and we all would get down and my mother would pick me up and seat me on the car’s boot while my father would go and bring us all, Chole with a tiny piece of cottage cheese swimming in them with Bhature’s that would have gone a mile if you stretched them. My mother would feed me, breaking those bhature’s into tiny morsels and dipping them in the curry dabbing a hint of pickle as they would disappear into my mouth. Sometimes I would try to bite her fingers and then she would laugh and sometimes when she thought I was not looking she would put one of those tiny morsels into my father’s mouth. We all would then walk towards the market, me holding on tightly to my father’s hand as my mother would try on bangles or some imitation jewelry, which after that Sunday excursion never left her vanity box, looking towards my father once in a while with did-this-look-good-on-me type of questions in her eyes. We would walk along the length of the bazaar from one end to another and on our way back my mother would bend down to wipe the ice cream running on my face and we all tired of endless Namaste’s and bumping into people would then head towards our beloved Amby, which miraculously never gave any starting trouble on her way back, perhaps she like us got tired of standing in an unfamiliar car park and longed for her own spot on our driveway. I would climb onto the back seat and stretch myself, inhaling the smell of old leather and reciting some poem from my English recitation class and my mother would take out a cassette of some old Hindi songs from the glove compartment, trying to create yesteryear aura in a yesteryear car with faded and yesteryear songs. My dad would hum along sometime, tapping the steering wheel as he did so. Sometimes, when a newer model Ambassador would catch his eye, he would launch into a rhetoric about the relative differences between the models, the break horse powers and cubic centimeters and that kind of stuff, and I still wonder as to how he was able to tell them apart because to me they all looked the same, drove the same way and even made same kind of noises.
Years’ went by and the Amby became just a fixture in our garage and sometime, late last year it was sold for an undisclosed amount albeit according to my mother the amount was so abysmal that my dad felt conspicuous even mentioning it. Anyways my father has bought a new obsession for himself, an ostentatious, fuel guzzling, 500 BHP, 7 speed coupe and apart from my mother and fishes in the nearby lake and the green peace activists, I don’t hear anyone complaining.
