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  1. something that I wrote long back....

    Tuesday 13 March 2012

        It was a lazy November afternoon, and I was sacrificing my beloved sleep for a suddenly scheduled exam at my Medical coaching center! Okay I seemed to have confused you a lot, to tell you, I am a small town girl, residing temporarily at New Delhi (Dilwalon ki Delhi as people call it). I mounted the Delhi Metro which usually remains crowd free in the late noon! If there is something very adorable about Delhi, it is the Delhi Metro...The trains are well maintained, neat and comfortably air conditioned. The frequency of the service and the extensive network, made life easier no doubt, but I liked it for a different reason!
       If you love to observe people, like I do, Delhi Metro is then a pilgrimage to you! I love to sit and watch people, listen to the fragments of their chats and see how they react to things! Thus unlike people who read books and listen to radio to shrug off their boredom, I enjoy much of my journey.
     Coming back to where I left the story, I boarded my train from the scheduled station, and settled down in a corner seat! For a few minutes I sat idly watching an under-aged mother, amusing herself with her baby and then brought out a text book for a last minute flipping!
     As the train moved for a few more minutes, I saw a young man board the train and take the seat beside me! I did not look up from the book and continued reading! However my 6th sense signaled me that the man was staring at my book...
        Suddenly he asked me 'Preparing for medical entrance! Eh?' That was quite obvious as the book in my hand had the words medical entrance inscribed in big letters! I looked up to say the same thing to him and that was the first proper glance I had of him and suddenly I fall short of words! The last rays of sun entering through the glass pane illuminated half of his face! The light impression of beard that unshaven for a day or two made him look strangely attractive! But the thing most prominent in him were his eyes behind his heavy framed glasses! The words like bright, expressive or dreamy wont suit them! There was something strange about them that you cant stare at them for more than a second! I suddenly forgot what I meant to tell him and just rapped out 'Huh?!' He repeated 'Are you preparing for medical entrances?' I said 'Yeah'. He smiled and looked at me, and I remember the famous lines of Tagore that meant 'Filled with the light of last hours, spring it was, I saw my destruction in your eyes...'. No it was not spring,but how did it mattered if your inner swallow sings even in winter?!
         Yes, i could hear the swallow in me singing! I folded my books and smiled back at him! He kept saying that he was a doctor who passed out that very year and that was the reason he got attracted to the book in my hand! Then he talked of his own preparation days and many tits and bits which some other time would have been enough to bore me! But I was not bored at all then! The next forty five minutes passed like a single second and it was time to utter goodbye! I dint know his name till then! I was wanting inside to talk some more to him, but my station was already there! I stood up finally and extended my arms and said 'I am Aratrika, it was nice meeting..' He shook hands and said  'Udhbhav Goyel'! I smiled and deboarded the train! I turned back after a few steps expecting a wave, but nay he was neither looking here nor waving! I smiled and said in my mind, 'Rest my dear swallow, its not spring yet! But the sudden receipt of your untimely song is also worth an applause...' I stepped forward to my destination...

    PS:- All things other than the song of swallow and the eyes mentioned here are fictitious...!!!!

        
      

    Posted by feeler of numbness at 03:13 | Labels: | 0 comments | | |

  2.  We fell apart. How could I keep trust on someone who bites me behind my back. I didn't ask for an explanation, that was not just my way. But i dreamed of having it every night. Years later we met, I shouted on him and so did he... I stormed out of his place... i never dreamed of him again.

    Posted by feeler of numbness at 22:03 | 2 comments | | |

  3. No, I did not watch the Aparna Sen directed film, The Japanese Wife. Infact, the fragments of the story line narrated to me by my mother and a movie freak friend, did not evoke any interest in me either... I was preoccupied with the thought that the story would be too superficial, considering the prospect of a pen-marriage between a Japanese lady and an India rural primary school teacher... It was until I read the original narration of the book by Kunal Basu ( thanks again to Pallav Deb, my akkshaytun, never-ending supplier of books), I was forced to change my perception...
     
       To be in love with someone at a distance of 7 seas and 13 rivers (I could not control my urge to use the translation of the bengali idiom sat sagor ar tero nodir par, an indication of an uncover-able distance) is something very tough, but the tougher part is to stick to it for twenty long years... I could as if feel Snehamay's insecurity even after twenty years of his married life, as my own, when he hesitated to mention to his wife about the visit and stay of his once-could-have-been bride at his place. I could feel the denseness of human emotions when Snehamay wonderes what perception, the lady, whom he rejected twenty years back, had of him... 

     I could feel the little boy's innocent curiosity towards his kaku's Japanese wife, who was an object of much ridicule mixed astonishment among all the villagers. And at last, I loved it, when contrary to my expectations that, Snehamay would need to attend his wife's funeral, it was his wife who travelled to Shonai, to attend his funeral... A perfect tragic ending... It was all in all a story of a common man, with most ordinary means, whose fate decided to make him a bit different, if not special, from other. In simple words, I loved the book!!!

    Posted by feeler of numbness at 21:53 | Labels: , , | 0 comments | | |

  4. Dates with Pablo Neruda...

    Wednesday 7 March 2012

    Poetry is something I have always been in love with but the preoccupation was always with Bangla (Bengali) poems and poets. It was only until a friend cum brother Srikumar Dasgupta introduced me to the lines:
             
                  And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
    in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
    it came from, from winter or a river.
    I don't know how or when,
    no they were not voices, they were not
    words, nor silence,
    but from a street I was summoned,
    from the branches of night,
    abruptly from the others,
    among violent fires
    or returning alone,
    there I was without a face
    and it touched me.

    I did not know what to say, my mouth
    had no way
    with names,
    my eyes were blind,
    and something started in my soul,
    fever or forgotten wings,
    and I made my own way,
    deciphering
    that fire,
    and I wrote the first faint line,
    faint, without substance, pure
    nonsense,
    pure wisdom
    of someone who knows nothing,
    and suddenly I saw
    the heavens
    unfastened
    and open,
    planets,
    palpitating plantations,
    shadow perforated,
    riddled
    with arrows, fire and flowers,
    the winding night, the universe.

    And I, infinitesimal being,
    drunk with the great starry
    void,
    likeness, image of
    mystery,
    felt myself a pure part
    of the abyss,
    I wheeled with the stars,
    my heart broke loose on the wind. 

    And I fell in love with Pablo Neruda... Since then, all my midnight coffees have been accompanied by Neruda... I read him over and over again and kept wondering how can someone speak out my mind and how can someone speak my heart at such ease...How can someone write lines like 
    "love is so brief, forgetting so long..." or "I want to do with you what spring does to the cherry trees" and the list of wondering continued...

     It's not that, I have not read romantic poems earlier. Sharing a common mother tongue with Rabindranath Thakur and the God of Romanticism Jibanananda Das himself, I have never fall short of poetry of any genre. But all their poems, though very expressive, always expressed their own feelings but Neruda inspite of not being my fellow countryman and inspite of all the dissimilarities of age and time between us, seemed so much more related to me...I wish I could assemble all his works here, but I surely cannot miss this one...

           If You Forget Me 

    I want you to know 
    one thing. 

    You know how this is: 
    if I look 
    at the crystal moon, at the red branch 
    of the slow autumn at my window, 
    if I touch 
    near the fire 
    the impalpable ash 
    or the wrinkled body of the log, 
    everything carries me to you, 
    as if everything that exists, 
    aromas, light, metals, 
    were little boats 
    that sail 
    toward those isles of yours that wait for me. 

    Well, now, 
    if little by little you stop loving me 
    I shall stop loving you little by little. 

    If suddenly 
    you forget me 
    do not look for me, 
    for I shall already have forgotten you. 

    If you think it long and mad, 
    the wind of banners 
    that passes through my life, 
    and you decide 
    to leave me at the shore 
    of the heart where I have roots, 
    remember 
    that on that day, 
    at that hour, 
    I shall lift my arms 
    and my roots will set off 
    to seek another land. 

    But 
    if each day, 
    each hour, 
    you feel that you are destined for me 
    with implacable sweetness, 
    if each day a flower 
    climbs up to your lips to seek me, 
    ah my love, ah my own, 
    in me all that fire is repeated, 
    in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten, 
    my love feeds on your love, beloved, 
    and as long as you live it will be in your arms 
    without leaving mine. 

    As long as people would continue falling in love, Neruda would be always remain in the hearts of lovers!!

    Posted by feeler of numbness at 08:14 | Labels: , , | 2 comments | | Location: Silchar, Assam, India |

  5.  There are some books that talk of things you know well, then there are some that speak things you vaguely know and lastly there are books that talk of things you feel but you don't really come up explaining your feelings... You stay in quasi state of semi-understanding and convincing yourself that this was the most you had the capability to make out... One such book is 'Reluctant Fundamentalist'.

      As I held that 180 paged book in my hands, (thanks to my friend Pallav Deb), I was quite in a fix, if at all that was my cup of tea to read something about a Pakistani migrant to America and so and so forth, but I am glad I did not drop the idea of reading it in. All the while, I was reading, I could strangely correlate with Changez, the lead of the story and sometimes even with the American soldier sitting opposite to him, in some Pakistani restaurant... The dusk darkens to night and I feel myself wondering along with Changez, the strange reasons of his aloofness towards the ongoing wars, his morally condemn-able, yet very honest feeling of momentary gayness  at the losses of America, the upheavals and downfalls of his professional and personal life and most importantly, the lack of connection between him and the American ways and life inspite of his apparent liking of these...
     
      I could feel Changez's heartfelt agony at the rejections of Erica, the woman he loved, and the lifts of his morale whenever he thought that probably he was of some importance to her. I could honestly feel that how even some one, dead long ago, can have an impact on your life, or can stand in your ways and then i felt that a lot of the feels were yet unfolded...

       The end of the book left me as if in the midst of an ocean full of uncertainty... I desperately kept hoping and infact believing that the American soldier was not at killing Changez. But strangely enough, to its comparison I merely wished that Changez would not be a terrorist. It was as if something that hardly mattered. The best part about the book was the probable antagonist being so much protagonist-like that you don't really feel bad even if he goes killing...All I am left to say is that, its one of the rarest pieces of work that engrosses you into itself completely... HAILS to Mohsin Hamid...

    Posted by feeler of numbness at 00:59 | Labels: | 0 comments | | Location: Silchar, Assam, India |