First Blah

Damn it's late...gotta wake up tomorrow but maybe I'll give in to the indulgence of slumber... Incoherent thoughts swirling in my head like a phantasmal opera with its moving, soulful beauty and its primeval agony. Words are flowing from my mind to my fingers, then to my keyboard and finally through a technological maze too complex for me to grasp to this very blog, creating shapes before my eyes...my own thoughts glaring back at me through a monitor. Trying to recall the last song that was played a while ago...but I know it's a lost cause, like trying to get back the love that's gone...How life plays out will always be a mystery people. Is randomness the ever-elusive truth, hiding right where we'd least expect it to, right in front of our faces? 

Much more than a memory

  The ancient tomb could only be aptly described with a single word - 'enigmatic'. Nothing else. Not auspicious, neither ugly nor beautiful. Just enigmatic. Sitting against ,its cold stone wall, one could distinctly feel the queer touch of enigma emanating from it. There it lay inconspicuously, discarded like a boring old toy by this crawling child of a city. The city had newer toys to play with - those tall glass things that shone like diamonds, so bright and 'endearing' that the city had no time for anything else, not the dirty, inhumane slums, not the make-shift huts of those poor workers building these fascinating 'toys', not the crumbling sidewalks, and least of all this ancient,  unattractive tomb, and those like it littered across the city's ever-expanding playpen. But strangely enough, it seemed as though the tomb did not mind the inattention. It stood there patiently like a wise old man, its weathered but still intricate sandstone facade seemed to bear the expression of a gloomy smirk. It knew the game this city played very well. It too was a favorite toy once, sheltering the earthly remains of some famous Lodi royalty, surrounded by plush gardens and admired for its stately beauty. But time has a way with things... Yet there it stood, the tomb, a symbol of ancient times gone by, seemingly more solid than those new, fragile glass toys the city is now so found of. The smirk was unmistakable...

"Hey Musa, I found that character to be plain ol' stupid! You know, the introvert brother who makes goldfish sculptures and goes on to become the famous general and then gives up everything in the end to make 'em sculptures again or somethin'..." on rambled Jha, as we sat on the stone steps of a tomb during one of those lazy Delhi dusks.
" No way man! That guy was pretty exciting. I mean the author does portray a lot of interesting thoughts through that character," I remember retorting defensively.
"Yeah but still... The father on the other hand was awesome! His innate inquisitiveness is so true for most of us, and his utter conviction to believe in possibilities..Man that guy just didn't give up! And remember that part where the travelling salesman convinces him about the magic carpet?"
"Yeah," I had recalled, smiling, "Those episodes were funny, but kinda ironical too."
"Right..ironical...hah! C'mon man, lets get a kulfi or somethin' and then a mausami juice. I found this awesome new place just around the next block...we should check it out!"
  I remember that day quite well. Jha had borrowed my paperback edition of 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' and had finished reading it that morning. Neither of us had understood most parts of the novel, but the parts we thought we did fascinated us. Nevertheless, we considered it a brave effort on the part of two young men and had promised ourselves that we'd read it again in five years' time. Maybe then we would grasp it a lot better.
  The kulfi was delicious as usual and the juice exceptionally sumptuous. I remember those summer evenings when sundown ushered a new gleam of life into the city after the deafening stupor of those scorching afternoons. Very gradually, the city used to stir and wake like some carnivorous, nocturnal creature embracing itself for a night-long hunt, or another day of painful starvation. Like the city, Jha and I  used to begin our street-scavenging in the evenings. At that time, I had been in the city for almost a month, and it was Jha who had introduced me to its varying facets. I remember the relief I had felt that first day when I noticed my good old friend from school at the station waiting for me. Noticing me, he had rushed forward in his typical stumbling gait, his short, thin frame donning a t-shirt and trousers, both way too big for him, a relic Converse that belonged to a different era, a face that resembled a perky fourteen-year-old with a beaky nose and a smile that was usually visible for a mile.
"Hey buddy how you been?!! Let's hurry! I got this place for you to stay but if we don't hurry some other sorry arse is gonna take it!"
From that moment on, it was a two-month ride that I would never forget.

  I had decided, much to the anxiety of my ever-worried mother, to backpack across India straight after completing my high school, with the secondary objective of joining a college. The primary objective was to get lost, with an overpowering desire to get away from everything that I had been associated with in my life, a desire to be footloose, a desire that I presume every man experiences at least once in a lifetime. For those of you who know how it's like to leave home and embark for the unknown, the memory must be terrifying and yet surprisingly fond, the time you first realize how small a dot you really are, and how you had taken everything up until then for granted. It is a liberating feeling like no other, but not the kind that removes the shackles, but rather makes your naive mind aware that they (the shackles) are indeed there. But as it so happened, I invariably had a friend from school no matter where I went. I had spent ten years at a boarding school in a beautiful hill  station in northern India, but I had no idea that such a span of time in this country was  enough to come across people from all over the sub-continent! It was because of my school probably, where people came to  study from all over. It was indeed a delightful little world of our own, a place with too many good memories and so few bad ones...And so it was Jha's turn in Delhi...

  We lived a bum-like life for the next two months. The 'place' Jha had arranged for me was in fact a dingy, decrepit shithole where I had to share a double-bed with four other guys. Mercifully, two of them  worked night-shifts, so there were only two of for most of the night. Unmercifully, however, one of them invariably returned from work very early in the morning, usually choosing to sleep between us, emanating an odor that smelt dreadfully similar to the landlady's strong, cheap perfume (I still wonder how he got about doing what I suspected he did, considering the fact that she had three burly sons about his age sleeping in the adjacent rooms!). But Jha had given me the better place. I wouldn't have survived a day in the God-forsaken basement  where Jha used to sleep. Rumor had it that after we'd left, someone had contracted small pox in that basement (there were like four rooms there with an average of three occupants), a decade after the virus was presumed to have been eradicated!
  But we weren't ordinary bums, considering the fact that we usually had sufficient money, dressed reasonably well and were permitted to enter most shops and restaurants. Of course we didn't go in to buy stuff, rather it was the air-conditioning that attracted us during those hot summer days. The best spot to cool off was this unguarded ATM booth in one of the back-alleys in our neighborhood. The booth stayed open 24 hours, which meant the A/C stayed on the whole time, and that we were the beneficiaries of a wonderful 21st century technology. We used to wander the streets for hours, while Jha tried to scrounge something or the other from this vendor or that. He used to shop-lift occasionally, which I disapproved. However, my disapproval did not stem from any moral considerations; it was just that I never had the guts to do it, and the fact that I was positively jealous of the smooth little punk and  his work. He used to be so smooth and nonchalant, more comfortable than a person with a loaded wallet buying the damn stuff! His favorites were this Levi's store and a bookshop that had an amazing collection. Being a passive accomplice, I used to mentally acquit myself by claiming that at least we stole knowledge!
  Jha knew the city like the back of his hand. The public transport buses were a nightmare, especially for me. The destinations were usually scribbled unceremoniously on the sides, but even then they were of no use since  the bus would be long gone before I deciphered the first few letters using my dismally inadequate Hindi skills. The only eligible thing was a number, like 491 or 263, and only God knew where those were headed. Moreover, the conductor used to make it worse in the process of 'helping' me in unintelligible Hindi. It was a marvel to watch Jha though. He recognized the numbers as if he had decided them! The only being, alive,dead or supernatural, who knew where 351A went was Jha. We used to take these buses and travel to every nook and corner of the city, from the shitiest holes to the grandest toys the city had to offer. And after a long day's aimless wandering, we used to cool off on top of this flyover which had an amazing view of the main street below, and of the giant flat-screen TV at one of the adjacent gas stations. At other times we used to head for one of those tombs, and relax in its stony embrace with locally-brewed beers, listening to the unspoken words of a big city night. Life at those moments seemed to converge with everything around us - the tomb, the trees, the streets, the lights, the people, the soil, the shaggy dogs, the ambulances and their dying patients, the stones, the criminals who prowled the streets at night, the self-deceiving thugs who wore suits and drove BMWs by day, the whores, the superfluous glass buildings and the every real slums, the brand stores, the pan shops, the amputated beggar, the holy cows, their divine dungs...everything was one, and one was everything.

  The tomb stood there like a patient old man. It was going to be its last night. In the morning, it was going to be demolished by men to pave way for a residential block. Its smirky expression was still unmistakable. It had  had many visitors over the years - men, bats, ants, flies, dogs...but only men seem to have any sort of attachment to it, like the group of people from the locality who had been protesting against its demolition, or the last man to visit it, who had just left a moment ago. He had stood there, crying silently, whispering to a nonexistent person beside him. He had seemed angry with his nonexistent companion for breaking a promise they had made. Something about a novel and five years still not being over...he then asked the stone wall of the tomb if they remembered... He had probably heard a reply, for he had smiled, turned and walked away, surprisingly pleased. But this time he was not alone. His little friend was beside him again, both engaged in an animated conversation as they left the tomb. Maybe the promise wasn't broken after all...

In search of a more mundane cause for concern

It is funny how sometimes things pass by in blurry, disjointed fashion, like a motion picture in fast-forward, recorded on what is now the archaic magnetic-tapped video cassette. A letter from a dear friend's spirited father, revolutions named after a flower, spiraling food prices, a humiliating defeat for Bangladesh cricket, a restaurant with the best dumplings and the worst service, a call from a long-lost co-conspirator, piles of pages and a glaring monitor, love and other intoxicants, a song, a fierce battle in Zawiya, a toothache and a funny story, a dream and familiar faces, blur and voices, more blur... If you've ever tried looking back on an ordinary week, you probably know what I mean.

Few of these things cause concern, like rising global food prices. For developing nations such prolonged soaring of prices above levels beyond the incomes of a large section of the population can have devastating consequences. The heart-rending account of a construction worker in Dhaka says it all. His earnings of barely $2 dollars a day is woefully inadequate to feed his family of three, as price of rice has increased substantially in recent months. Three meals a day which was once a basic requirement is now a luxury, subjecting his children to chronic malnutrition. As children grow up in different parts of the Third World in such conditions, an entire generation is being raised underdeveloped, both physically and mentally,severely curbing the future prospects of a better world. Besides genuine supply-side concerns tied to nature's wrath at times, there are also issues fueling this inflation that deserve attention, like the loose monetary policies of the developed world, particularly the US where the devaluation of the greenback to reduce US trade deficit comes at the cost of increasing commodity prices, which are priced in dollars. Moreover, speculation in the commodities market, the aim of which is to profit from price fluctuations, benefit from price instability and further deteriorate the situation. Panic buying by nations in world markets add to the mess. Things are to be done and that too without delay, so that better tomorrows arrive without hesitation and my concerns remain limited to more mundane things, like hair loss and whether I would indeed be bald by the time I am thirty five.