Temporary Aberrations II - why stop now?

Andaman - April, 2007


Starting out - Chennai










History Lesson - Ross Island, off Port Blair






And Finally, that first perfect, blissful, deserted beach, and that gorgeous, deceptive surf that picks you up and tosses you around before you know what is what. Oh well, it's like a nice massage after the strenous hour-long cycle ride down the only road on this island.

It's called Neil, by the way. The island, not those strange discolourations we woke up with all over our bodies the next morning.



And then, The two beaches explored, random South Korean surfer picked up, we made our illegal and highly dubious hired way to Havelock, and "the most perfect beach in the world" - Beach No. 7 - otherwise known as radhanagar.



Which I must admit was sheer bliss to wake up to at five in the morning.

Tho' I guess you really can have too much of a good thing. What else would explain our picking up and leaving that perfect, well-supplied existence after a mere five days and then heading off into the complete unknown under a rainy sky and the gathering gloom of nightfall on a strange mysterious island about which we only knew random things overheard at random times from really random people.

On our way to long island, through marshes eerily reminiscent (in our belatedly uncertain mood - once we were already on the last boat out) of the heart of darkness-ish representations.




Whither blowest thou, wind?





And then, those crazy, ten days of fending for ourselves in the wilds of uninhabited Lalaji Bay - seperated from the locals by a jungle on a hill. Getting there by boat with the ever-elusive,exclusive boat service of Mr. Catraman (Quartermain? Catamaran? we never did find out for sure - the most mysterious of them all - not to mention unreliable, bare-faced liar and thief of the highest order!)

Our friendly neighbours

Our Front Porch

Su Casa Mi Casa - literally

My cousin, dreaming up ever crazier escape plans, or newer ways to murder me, each more gruesome, painful and prolonged than the last.

And then the journey back to the now well deserved hedonistic pleasures of Havelock

Ah, back in the lap of luxury, with Nutella-Banana pancackes on call till twelve at night, and free deer meat dinners with the extremely friendly staff who invited us to share their meal with them. And even though snakes could, and did get into the room, at least there was a room to get into and out of right. And someone else to light the fires, thank Godfrey!

Not to mention the constant reassuring presence of a boat or two tied up right in front. The psychological significance of which sight is not to be underestimated on two souls fresh away from the experience of being marooned on long island for ten days and ten nights. Without the dubious benefits of Iced Tea!

Fin

Temporary Aberrations

Switching temporarily to pictoral rather than verbal communication. Not a defeat just a tactical retreat. There have been so many stories - and I promise the words will be back. In the meantime, here's a patch-up solution of sorts.

Egypt - Feb. 2007

I have been home for more than a week now. On my way beck, I made many plans for many trips with many people. I told them I would work out the details once I got home, and then let them know. I was going to go to Goa, and Bombay, and Ladakh, and Pin Valley, and Nepal, all in the course of the next few months. I flew into Delhi from Chennai in the evening, and was planning to stay the night and take a bus home in the morning. As I landed, Gautam called and said he had two tickets to Paris Je T’aime, and was I interested.
!!!
It was in a couple of hours in Saket, leaving me no time to go deposit my bags at the flat. A fact that my slow brain (I had a fever, gimme a break) only registered when I was already on the metro in CP, halfway home. So I turned around and dashed like hell, and made it to saket – nearly, almost, not-quite-in-time, toting bag and baggage. (You shoulda seen the look the autowallah gave me when I said PVR). I was carrying three bags, and snorkeling flippers, and attached to one of the bags were various random dangly items of the shoes and sleeping-bag variety. And yes, I did bear a certain resemblance to, and feel quite a lot like, mowgli coming out of the jungle into civilization. Anyways, the movie was fun. Go see it, it’s a little gimmicky in parts, but three or four of the shorts are brilliant enough to make the whole thing worth it.

Oh, and I almost missed my plane in Chennai, and after all the misadventures I’d been having there this last time I was really desperate to leave Tamland.

Anyways, Delhi was just such a nice, comfortable zone, and then it was so damn hot in the day, I ended up staying there for three nights. I realised that since I was up every night till four, the only way I was getting out was to take a bus at five in the morning and travel before it got too hot. So that’s what I did, left the house at four-thirty and was on a bus at five. Since the whole Dera problem in Punjab was brewing up, I decided not to tell dad in advance of my plan, since he would worry or discourage me.

At around nine, my father called and asked me where I was. I very proudly told him I was already halfway home, chuckling to myself, thrilled to bits at exceeding expectations. In a very subdued tone he said, ‘Oh, ok. Tell me when you get here.’ And then proceeded to inform me that my cousin had just died in a car accident. This cousin was not someone I was close to; we hadn’t spoken in like fifteen years, but he was my age, a few months older, and I still have the videotape of my first birthday when I pushed him and made him cry.

So I arrived home to a funeral, to the sudden, unexpected death of a young person, like you or me. A person who was leaving in a few days for Symbiosis, Pune, and wanted to hang out with his friends these last few days. A person whose grandmother, and father, and mother, and aunts and uncles would now have to see through the rituals that he was expected to see them through. They had to bathe his young, battered body, and give him a shoulder, and light his pyre and watch him burn. His name was Sartaj.

His bhog was yesterday, but I did not go. The funeral itself had been all I could take. The whole place was full of the usual drama, and the old people – almost business-like about it – were reducing it to the usual ritualistic farce, saying just the craziest, most absurd things (I don’t know why it makes me so angry every time, but I feel outraged at how, after stripping life of all its dignity, they are not content, but must rape death too, disrobing it of it’s solemnity). And when I came face-to-face with his parents, there wasn’t a single thing I could think of to say or do.

This morning I woke up to hear that my Nana-Ji has passed away. We are now trying to book flights and somehow get to Bhopal, and my Nani, as soon as humanly possible. My mind is numb, and all I can think of is my poor mother, alone in Africa with her sorrow and remorse and guilt and regret. They weren’t speaking to each other – more out of habit than anything else. They were both equally proud and stubborn people, and though they would both keep checking on the other and passing messages obliquely through all of us, they would never talk directly. And now he’s gone, and the game can’t ever end.

Why Boys Don't Cry - and should

Ok, this is a little sketchy and something i started working on a while ago and never got to finishing. So excuse the flimsiness, especially of the latter half of the argument. Time permitting and fortune smiling, I will someday flesh it out. In the meantime, consider it a rant come wandering discourse.

It’s funny to see how boys react when you mention that they’re opressed. The way they rear up in sheer outrage would do credit to any Victorian virgin worth her salt. Their reactions are, tellingly, so instantly outraged and defensive, but that doesn’t seem to strike them as significant. If feminism as a political movement eventually generated awareness of socially constructed roles on a pan-gender scale, and led to movements like queer theory, it seems, somehow, somewhere, to have skipped (or been actively resisted by) your average heterosexual male. Not only are most (relatively intelligent – no irony intended) boys quite unaware of how gender roles shape and dictate their reactions and responses, they are invariably averse to any nudges towards thinking in that direction. To quite an extent, I believe girls growing up today in a doddering patriarchal setup like ours face lesser pressure, and enjoy more freedom to explore and define themselves. For one, of course, the insidious forces of this hegemony have been stripped to the bones under the critical/relentless microscopes of feminist theorizing. The act of collusion with the system then, for a woman, becomes, and cannot help but be, a self-aware/conscious act. Though many people like to dismiss feminism as the deranged/ extreme mutterings of a bunch of overzealous females with over-active imaginations (and, as if this were the last word in insults, who obviously aren’t getting any) it undeniably provides one with interesting insights even on this reaction itself. For me, its significance as a critical/political stance lies less in the answers it posits (insightful, hysterical or otherwise) and more in the questions it raises. By bringing into the arena of study Gender Construction and its socio-political origins, impact and repercussions, feminism has rendered an invaluable service to humanity, and the way it perceives itself.

Why its even more imperative now to keep the boys in line: as the system crumbles – crashes and burns gloriously in this age where, as Gore Vidal put it, ‘machines are essential for survival, men are redundant’ (or something to the effect…), boys find themselves (or don’t find themselves, as I am arguing) defending the last bastion.

Willing victims – why boys collude. Why they’re more indoctrinated, feel obliged as favoured insider recipients of the system – ‘works in our favour or so we’re told’

Why boys always look for mother-figures – so comfortable with/used to the idea of being looked after, taken care of, and being told what to do with themselves. Looking for approval, peer groups – comfort and confirmation in conformity – even the rebels tend to congregate, and loners long to communicate, if only to assert/express/explain their steppenwolfian condition of being/mode of existence. Girls outgrow, and never really understand why boys will always need to gang up to make fun of another guy, why they will kiss-and-tell, given half a chance, and why their public image will always be of paramount importance. Rituals of male-bonding. Boys are like Berkeley’s doubtful tree in the forest: if no one hears the sound, did they ever really fall?

'take a picture'

we were on this boat with a group or fat, middle-aged indian tourists. they were north indian but that is incidental. they saw a local wearing snorkelling gear and got very excited - they brought their cameras out and started asking him to 'dive! dive!'.
Made me think again of a couple of things:
one. India makes a spectator sport of anything. When it is possible, available and affordable, we would still rather watch someone else do it than try it for ourselves. I suppose you could argue that one can't reasonable make judgements on all of india based on obese, middle-aged tourists. Which neatly brings me to my second point - that's practically the only kind of indian tourist there is. It's amazing how since my cousin and I are two young girls travelling by ourselves, everyone comfortably assumes we're foreigners. And when we tell them we're not, they look around confusedly, and then ask, 'But where's everybody else?'
Where indeed?
In a country where the young people exceed the old ones, and I don't have the stats but I think they're pretty conclusive, where are all the young people? The people who should be taking the time while they have it, to do silly things, meaningless things and just-because stuff.
On Marina Beach in Chennai, the surf looked pretty awesome, and I was there in the evening when the wind wasn't offshore, but I'm guessing in the morning there's a good offshore wind, which, as far as I know, makes for ideal surfing conditions. And yet, nobody does. Not even the young people who study, work, live in Chennai. The only surfing club I found in India was started by a foreigner and caters primarily to them.
What is going on? Or, rather, why isn't anything? Why is the average young person so insecure, so obsessively petrified of falling off the treadmill? If you can't do it now, when as a young person you're still driving your life with the training wheels on, when will you?

The Flip Side of Bliss

Wearing your clothes inside out.
Why are all the seams inside, constantly rubbing against your skin?
Millennia of oppression – whoever came up with the idea anyway? And why has it endured? – the space-time pervasive idea of social perception – consciousness of the Gaze and how it affects formation of self identity.
Why is it such a basic taboo that you don’t even stop to think about it? Ok, let me backtrack, or pull-out and give you a wide angle shot – a sort of context for my text. Yesterday, while dressing for bed, I put my t-shirt on inside-out by mistake (so what else will happen when you sleep at three?) and damned if it wasn’t more comfortable that way. The sudden absence of constant irritants rubbing against your skin, reminding you of your enslavement to clothing/modesty; no label asserting its presence against your nape, lodged right at the base of your brain/spine, an inescapable steady reminder of uber-successful capitalist policies of property – YOU OWN WHAT YOU CAN CLAIM – we’ve all sat through history in school, we all know that empires, even entire continents flourished on the undeniable truth of that assertion.

Having made this incredible, liberating discovery, I looked around to liberate the unenlightened masses still burdened by the old illusions. Unfortunately, the only one around was my cousin, who just heard me out and said, ‘yeah, of course’ (in that tone she reserves for speaking to slow dimwits who have only just now managed to crawl up to the lip of the fountain of knowledge, where she has been perched all along) ‘you should try it with underwear.’
So, I did.
!!!!!!
I kid you not. What have I been doing all these years. Ok, before making any counter-arguments (ummm, yeah, still assuming faceless, nameless millions read this) go try it out - wear your underwear inside-out for a day. Just one day. And then tell me I'm not right. Not saying I'll believe you then either, but don't even try to say it without testing it out.
Ok, I am not just being carried away by the force of my own rhetoric, I do realize there were originally strong functional reasons to keep the seams inside – less exposure, less wear and tear, possibly also better weather-proofing. But I don’t know how far any of these still hold true: in this our age of easy production, excess and use and discard lifestyles, we’re usually done with our clothes way before they’re through with us. And honestly, an inside-out shirt doesn’t feel any colder to me either.
Next on my agenda, trying my jeans inside out - if I can ever get them that way that is. Damn them skinny jeans, its like the nineties revisited. Not that I'm really complaining, I was always not so secretly an Eighties/ early Nineties child. (remember the Wham! gloves?)

All in the echoes of my mind

Ever heard the song "Roll to Me" by Del Amitri? It's what my cousin plays to me everytime she wants me to make her a cigarette... Ah well, it's still better than the last song that got stuck in here.

Back from Bliss

The only thing I hate about visits to Dharamsala is the fact that they always end. And way before you're prepared. Oh well, the transience of bliss and all such...

Prosaic.
The patterns life always falls into when you're at home. It's impossible to think poetry, unless its the slit-my-veins-and-watch-the-blood-pool-in-the-golden-sunlight variety (a borrowed image - thank you chaddimaster). It's not the physical space or the temporal situation - God knows both are bizzare enough to generate volumes of verse, or worse(sorry). It's just that you always get caught in the gravity field of the inane trivia of everyday things, and it sucks you in deeper and deeper. It tends to travel with you, so that when you are standing at the foot of the Great Pyramid at Giza, fighting so hard to hold on to (or create out of thin air) a wisp of awe, ignoring the swarming multilingual multitudes which are increasingly a fact of life on this, our overburdened planet, and pretending not to see the locals somehow allowed to break the 'no climbing' rule, clambering all over it with utter disregard for the fact that you are trying to have a polite conversation (of sorts) with the poor beleagured monument, your parents will pipe in with a perfectly timed query about 'who's carrying the sunbloc?', or 'has anyone seen my hat?'. Life could be so much larger than life if it just butted out once in a while.

So, bowing my head to the demigods of inevitability, here's a random picking from an endless list of pet peeves:

• those tricky little fliers that slip out all over the floor when you open the morning papers. Ugh, a mess of unwanted advertisements at my feet that I then have to get up to clear. It's not like mornings weren't tough enough anyway.
• Nails, no, growing nails. If anything discounts the theory of evolution, it's that. After years of clipping them, they still don't get the message. Whatever happened to adaptation for survival, and learning from experience. Nails are like the cockroach of the human body.
• People. Sometimes some of them some of the time, and sometimes all of them all the time. If there really was a god, we'd each have a planet all to ourselves.
• Relatives. Ok, this one's a little tricksy, and though its logical to assume the last one covers this too, I thought it deserved special mention.
• Objects getting ideas and wandering off into hibernation or on Grand tours so that they go missing for years and then suddenly turn up again, lying there so innocently, trying to assume an air of 'Who me, but I was here all along!' Really, who do they think they are fooling.
• Order, or our vain attempts at
• Sanity, or our pitiful pretensions to
• Lists, which sorta falls under both the last categories. Really, who do we think we're fooling.
• How the shirt you wanna wear is always at the bottom of the pile in a rucksack, or right at the back of a neatly arranged drawer... especially right after you've just spent hours arranging the damn thing to your satisfaction. It's either me or the universe's sense of humour, and I'd pick the latter everytime.

Ending on a less depressed note (I beg off with lack of sleep, and way more than a tolerable dose of social interaction), I still get high on treasure hunting through my parents' mountains of collected and inherited crap - thank god for those magpie tendencies). My grandmother died eleven months ago, and my father, while clearing out her stuff, rediscovered a pile of old LPs of his which he had written off as lost or whacked. Going through them today, I found an original pressing of The Sgt. Pepper's LHCB, with a perfectly intact cover, and, hidden among a pile of old abba, paul anka, reggae stuff, another of Dark Side of the Moon. Again Perfectly preserved. Glory be!

Am Back... and making you wish I wasn't

When traveling through foreign lands the first thing that tends to disappear is your sense of anonymity. You are no longer just another Indian amongst millions (or a billion and a half) speaking the same language, paying the same taxes, struggling against the same daily realities as everyone else around you. As a traveler your identity becomes a fluid, amorphous thing; something to be defined by every conversation you have, every move you make. An open space, filled with questions and possibility, and something you are sharply aware of at all times. It happens for everyone, but perhaps for an Indian the shift is more dramatic, more unsettling: huge crowds are a very essential part of being Indian, perhaps explaining the inherent insecurity that makes us form lines and rush to get a seat even when there is no need. The fear of being forgotten, left behind, or simply swallowed up in the mass of humanity that is this country is something we are all born to. From school admissions to job prospects, life in India is a constant round of musical chairs, with way too many circling the one available seat, hoping for luck and whatever else it takes to get ahead of the crowd.

Though my amusement may never fade, I have gotten somewhat used to the spectacle that presents itself without fail at the boarding gate for any flight into India: all it takes is one nervous Indian, usually a very old lady in a pink and yellow sari, clutching a pillow and what can only be called a trunk on wheels as hand baggage, to stand in front of a closed boarding gate an hour before the scheduled time. Faster than the smile beginning to form on your face, a serpentine line creates itself, straight out of some snake-charmers conjuring repertoire; complete with octogenarian couples, huge families struggling to keep track of their luggage as it heads for a collision course with the orbit of the twelve kids zooming around the nucleus of a mother clutching at the illusion of order and sanity, and the odd village or two. Though I may have been hallucinating, I swear I’ve even heard a moo or two, and seen the swish of the occasional brown tail. Of course they all know that the flight is not going to leave without them, and they’re pretty sure they’re going to get their assigned seat, and all the food and put-away-in-your-pocket condiments they could possibly need (you’ve paid for it, after all!), but better safe than sorry you know. The spectacle is familiar to seasoned travelers, and I’ve even borne indignant, and somewhat amused witness to airport officials having some fun with the phenomenon: at Yemen once, when the line resolutely refused to unform itself after repeated requests from the confounded official (we do have a long and proud tradition of passive resistance to live up to), the PA system crackled into life to announce that the boarding gate had been changed to another one. I have never seen such a mad rush, not even at Dadar when the fast local to Andheri arrives. Creaky joints, fragile bones, recalcitrant kids and monumental baggage notwithstanding, the line had reformed at the new gate within a minute. After a brief tussle and some reshuffling in the order, the disgruntled losers and the glorious victorious soon settled down in their hard won positions, reconciled to an hour of standing till the boarding call. But the wily Arabs were not about to be cheated out of a promising hour’s entertainment. They tried again, with the same announcement for the original gate. With the predictability of Halley’s comet coming to call, my undaunted countrymen launched forth once more into the fray, not to be stopped by mere scraped knees, elbows in ribs, embarrassment or common sense. I am proud to declare after an hour of watching my fellow-countrymen ping-pong across the terminal that either the officials tired of trying, or time ran out, but the line never gave way against the furious advances of the crafty foe. And of course, all of us seated spectators got seats on the plane too, but I doubt we settled into them with quite the same sense of satisfaction, of a hard-won victory to be savored.