Of T.Akka and Telephones

I remember her vividly. I don't see a reason why I should. But I do.

Every summer, until I finished high school, we split our summer holidays between the Andhra coast and the Karnataka coast travelling second class on long train journeys from wherever we happened to be stationed at then. The journeys were almost never without event, colored largely by my mother's anxiety at seeing my father step off the train in search of idlis to feed the brood. Idlis were the only train food we children(my two sisters and I) were allowed by mother. 

I digress.

This is about Telephone Akka,Palakol, West Godavari District,(where my grandparents, migrants from a wholly different culinary culture had migrated to in the early 1950s). Telephone Akka, who never aged. While we furiously outgrew our favorite clothes, T.Akka looked the same every year. Not that we were particularly attentive to detail, but since all three siblings concur on this point, am assuming there must have been some merit in this observation. 

Grandfather's Udupi restaurant in the heart of Andhra was doing as well as the 1980s would allow it to. Well enough to afford a telephone anyway. The telephones from the era followed the same aesthetics that came to define another beloved symbol of that era, the Ambassador. Generous curves, stately heft and an aura of indestructibility. There were two phones at their home, one in the hall, and another in Grandfather's bedroom.

Not having a telephone at our own home, the contraption in the privacy of the bedroom afforded me immense possibilities to spend a quiet afternoon gainfully occupied, confirming that dialing 100 would indeed, following a couple of rings, like in the movies, be answered by a strident "Policetation! Cheppendi".

The accompanying local telephone directory was used to dial the numbers of random but similarly upstanding members of my grandfather's social strata inasmuch that they too could afford a telephone. Frantic "Hello, yavarendi. Yavarendi" responses were responded to, first with raspy nervous shallow breathy sounds and as the many exploratory attempts went unpunished, unconvincing adult voice impersonations(followed inevitably by amused self congratulatory giggles). 

The adults adopted an economy in expression rarely associated with my family, when using the telephone. We children were forbidden to use it except under strict supervision to say Hello to father calling from a STD booth (he usually returned home after his railway security escort duties for brood were done). 

I still have trouble making phone calls when I have nothing to say and one overpowering memory from childhood is a bunch of indulgent adults telling me to ask father if he had dinner or if he was riding the scooter carefully and all I managed was a shy Hello.Hello at which point my father would be exasperated and ticking off seconds he was paying for, ask to handover the phone to my more verbose and vocal sisters.

The telephone was respectfully covered with white embroidered lace and placed on a velvety mat. Everyone bustling by would stop to adjust the lace cover, if it had slipped off, exposing some part of the instrument to the vagaries of the Costa summer. Somewhere in the 1990s lace slipped out of fashion as preferred dust deterrent ,reflecting the changes in the aesthetics of a generation seduced by all things plastic and lace found a new calling as preferred choice for middle class ladies' honeymoon lingerie until then, I imagine, monopolised by burlap cotton sacks.

I don't exactly remember when I first saw/met(never spoke to her) T.Akka. All I can say is that the earliest memories of my grandparents' house predating her fleeting presences are few, if actually any. T.Akka with her SINGER sewing box.

Every month, once or twice, T.Akka would arrive unannounced to the house, when we were playing under the parijatha tree in the courtyard or lost in comics bought for the train journey which we reread again and again.

Immaculately draped in pastel toned saris, the pleats millimetrically aligned in flowing layers, she carried a little bag on her shoulder and glasses which now seem rather large for her face. I've never seen her break into a smile. Strange for a girl of twenty and a bit. She walked into the house and after a brief exchange of perfunctory greeting with whoever was in the hall, got straight to the job.

She placed the bag next to the telephone stand and deliberately opened it to extract a SINGER Sewing box. A red box with SINGER written in an archaic font. She placed the box next to the telephone and then slipped off the lace, carefully folding it. She then opened the box like a surgeon and extracted from it, a little blower, the size of her index finger. She squeezed the head in little squirts pointing the end at various tricky crevices in the phone where dust would settle in like the cradle, the mouth piece filter and such like. After a few more squirts, she would ceremoniously place the blower back into the SINGER box and then extract a bottle of Dettol and cotton wool. She wiped the entire set, including the spiral umbilical cord between the handset and the base. She probably took a good couple of minutes working her way over the phone after which she would wait for the antiseptic to dry out completely. She would then place her Dettol bottle back and subsequently extract a vial of rosewater. She would pluck another wad of cotton and soak it with the rosewater and then repeat the religious cleansing of the telephone.

Finally, extracting another piece of lint free cloth(not unlike the ones that are thrown in for free by opticians), she would rub down the telephone .The air, now permeated with the smells of a Madras Apollo hospital florist.

She would then repeat the exact same process on the telephone in the bedroom and then leave without ado.

I've never seen her getting paid, though I am sure she was. 

On days when we were not at home when T.Akka arrived, I would suspect she had come by the tinge of rosewater hanging in the air. A quick sniff of the telephone from close quarters would confirm my suspicion and I would inform grandmother that I knew T.Akka was here if only to hear her tell others in the room, what a fine sense of smell I had. 

And all this would repeat the next time, she came home.

I dont know if T.Akka remembers me, but I do remember her vividly. I suspect with good reason that she would not remember me, which would be as good a reason for her to think I don't, in case she does remember me,but I do(remember her). So good reasons can usually go take a long hike, when it comes to all matters memory toned.

Sometime after high school, I stopped going to my grandparents place, instead opting to cauterise my brain in a cram school through the holidays and the broken link has never quite mended since. I've visited them four or five times thereafter (they thankfully visited us more often) and like the telephone which now no longer warrants a special place in the hierarchy of middle class megalomania that it used to in the 80s or the services of T.Akka, have filled the glorius summer holiday sized hole in my years with less impressive fillings none smelling of rosewater on a summer afternoon.

I will continue hoping T.Akka is fine wherever she is growing old gracefully in them perfectly pleated saris and wishing her present summer days have less cause for regret than mine.

Bicycle Blues (True story bro.)

It's been a while since I've returned from cycling up in the Himalayas. Long enough for immediacy and the seared shadows of the mountains to have dimmed in the whirl of the daily commute and glare of naked light bulbs of yellow expectations.

There is so much that will remain unsaid here. I am not a notebook and a pen person, so the names of little hamlets and the mountain people are already fading.  The nine days I cycled there, are all blending into each other and distorting my recollections of sunsets, prayer flags, wind sculpted ravines I'd then imagined plunging into and landing painlessly on a family of shocked plump marmots.

However, there is a little stretch of the trail I'd like to put down on record.

I shall fast forward to the aforementioned little stretch, between Pang and Debring, two outposts in the bizarre mountain desert wilderness, both blessed and damned at the same time. Timeless, except they are force fitted into the present by the yellow Maggi packets in the little road side shacks.

The first days on the trail had been singularly taxing, much like a baby just out of the womb, I gasped and gasped for air which I barely inhaled before I had to cough it out or wheeze judiciously to keep the cough from wearing me out. I took a couple of days to settle into some breathing rhythm where I could manage significant displacement without having to stop.

We started for Pang from a place called Whiskey Nallah(named so because an Indian Army truck bearing nightcap supplies for soldiers hereabouts toppled and spilled it's contents into the cold desert dusk), where we had spent the night.

We started early, the sun had just started to rise and there was a crystal crust of frost on the seat as we mounted the cycles, pedaling up the Lachlangla Pass in a stiff trundle. We reached Pang a little after noon, not without incident, having to deal with a couple of flats and a couple of tyres actually ripping at the seams and then climbed up a few steep kilometers into the plateau of the Moray Plains.

Moray plains.

After the longest time of pedalling at the lowest gear and terrain more suited to mountain goats than anything humans could engineer, there lay a brilliant stretch of black tarmac, straight as it could be, shimmering and disappearing into a madly fluttering haze at the horizon. Flanked on either side by signature landscape reminiscent of imagery from epic Mongol sagas. Vast emptiness, textured silences and a tinge of green coaxed out by the summer sun.

The air seemed to buzz with an almost unnatural energy and as we loitered at the summit. For the first time in all these days on the trail, all my aches, the dodgy knee which I had injured fording a mountain stream  somewhere below, seemed to fade away and like a crazed Pamplona bull just out of the pen, I shot into the road in a blood tinged rush, cranking up a gear every few pedals.

The whole scene was set to a blues soundtrack running in my head. I dont think I can remember if there was a particular one, but I shall pick Howling Wolf's Wang Dang Doodle as most likely.

There I was slicing through the thin,still mountain air. Howling Wolf's swagger in my shoulder posture. I was the Mongol horde charging to plunder, I was Dylan writing Visions of Johanna, I was Arthur swinging the Excaliber jubilating in it's perfectly balanced arc , I was Paul Simon's Boxer winking at the women in diaphanous tight dresses and their come-ons on Seventh Avenue, I was the rifle shot that killed an antelope in a Hemingway short story.

I, for that briefest of moments, was everything I wanted to be and could be.

And then there was a fierce gust of head wind, that slammed into me from nowhere and time froze as I was stopped dead in my tracks. One moment speeding down in a visceral day dream, and the next suspended in perfect equilibrium, all the energy pumped into the pedal, emasculated without malice, by the gust micromanaging my inertia to a standstill.

As the gust swept by chuckling, I put my foot down more in shock than anything and the thin film of sweat evaporating on my cooling forehead being the only sensation I registered.

I think I must have laughed at it all. There was no one around to confirm. But I can I imagine I did. 

The rest of the journey is possibly inconsequential to what will be my memories of the trail. Numbers like 5400m at the highest point may probably tell a story. Bragging rights for bar stool conversations.

When at the end like they say your life flashes before you, in what I'd like to believe will be a set of photographs set to the comforting whirr of a projector beaming pictures on the favorite wall of your childhood home, I'd like the operator to really linger for a bit on breathtaking landscape of the moments on the black tarmac, as I have one last chance to chisel out a hitherto unseen detail and then fade to black to a familiar and dear blues riff and ...




PS:
For context: In June this year, in the company of three other friends, I cycled from Manali to Leh and since then have been left with the lingering feeling that I may have done the coolest thing I'll ever do and learning to live with that while I plot to ensure that this will not be so.

Of delayed trains and an early breakfast at Denny's

I met Anna Pianzola in the summer of 2004.  Some people would say that this isn't a long time ago. Maybe it isn't. But with time ever slowly accelerating as I enter my 32nd year, the past is receding away faster than ever, like it has been for the past few years, like it will be tomorrow ticking faster than today, everything seems so long ago and worse.. concocted. But I digress.
I met Anna Pianzola with her grey irises symmetrically strewn with black shards of Veneto glass on the last train back from Nikko on an August Saturday night.The Tobu line train to Asakusa at the fringes of the madness that is Tokyo to be precise.
It maybe summer in the plains, but up in highlands of Nikko, fog was rolling in, and the train with dew drops sticking to it's sides like beads of sweat on the back of a particular lissome lady who will remain unnamed , settled with a sigh. People more anxious than usual (the last train has that effect, much like when you decide to marry for reasons other than love) hurried in to catch a seat for the three hour ride back into the Tokyo night.
I found a seat by the doorway of the last carriage( I've managed to find a seat in the last carriage of most trains in Japan). Just before the train was scheduled to depart, two women came running into the platform with their day packs slowing them considerably. One woman was much taller than the other. The shorter one was Anna. They got in as the station master politely apologized into his tinny Tannoy for any inconvenience caused by the slippery stairways and that the doors would shut for a departure in the next minute.
As the train departed, a drizzle ,which soon turned into a sleety downpour with raindrops splattering the panes and them slowly sliding away backwards like helpless panicking lovers,  clouded the countryside.
We only got as far as a few kilometers past Shimo-Imaichi when the train slowed down and eventually squealed to a full stop. Shortly a tremolo voice (very apologetically) announced that, there had been a landslide and the tracks needed clearing. A crew was on the job and he'd report the progress periodically. Or that was what I thought he announced (my Japanese was laughable then, it is merely bad now).
An old, heavily made up lady donning a green surgical mask with her picnic bag and her older mother in a wheel chair stood leaning against a pillar next to Anna with a deep frown on her forehead. I walked up to her and offered my seat. She refused at first, but was happy to take up on my offer once I insisted. Her mother, in the wheelchair, insisted I take a lion's share of the almonds she had in a pouch.
Fair bargain. But more importantly, there I stood next to Anna (feeling like a creep, for this subterfuge, but in my defence I probably would have given up my seat even if it wasn't for Anna) and for the first time studied her from close quarters. There were drops of the rain nestling in little pockets in her tightly pleated brown hair. Probably twenty and Italian (Guidebook one carries gives away a fair bit. Hers was a 2003 Japan Rough Guide in Italian). Freshly waxed arms, clear skin and those eyes . Her companion was Nordic and what humour writers would call big boned.  But this isnt about her. It's about Anna.
"How long do you think we'll be here?", Anna asked her big boned friend.
"Couldn't for the life of me figure what the guy announced", she shrugged in reply.
"There has been a .land..landslide", I stammered and weakly interjected.( Opening lines have never been my forte and sadly never will be)
"Oh, that sounds bad", she said with the searching look of a person who'd only just seen the person who'd spoken to them.
(Over the years since, I've known many women who have perfected this to an art form, and I've learnt to be a little less disappointed with being an invisible presence to pretty women).
"Did he say by how much we are delayed? We have a train to catch from Asakusa", she continued.
"He said, help was on the way. So I guess, we shouldn't be here for too long."
"That's good to hear.", she said, as that constant wingman of mine, uncomfortable silence, slid in between us.
.
?
.
"You travelling in Japan", she asked after a while.
"No, I am here on business for a few months", I said, hopefully,with a not too audible sigh of relief.
"You are Indian, aren't you?", she continued.
" Yes. Been here a couple of months now. And you? I guess you are Italian"
" Yes. I am. And my friend is Swedish. We met in Tokyo and are travelling together. I just finished a semester at med school in Torino."
"A doctor then."
"Not quite yet. I am planning to move to the US on an exchange program, so I guessed I could use a holiday before that"
I'll spare you the details of the small talk, though sometimes small talk is all we have. We were there for the rest of the night after the worsening weather made clearing the debris, the driver announced, increasingly dangerous. The lady in the wheelchair had run of almonds. She was probably wishing she hadn't been as generous as she was with her gratitude (But at some point in all our lives, who isn't)
Anna and me talked through the night as her Swedish friend pretended to be consumed by a deep dreamless sleep. We talked of the war, volcanoes, sakura, sake, home and for some reason soaplands and Mishima(who I'd just discovered)  .
I most admired her for her fortitude in the face of the certain to be missed prebooked train connection. ( One doesn't just miss a train, in Japan, it can mean having to skip one's next vacation altogether). Admiration is an admirable and a very convenient projection of many unarticulated emotions.
At twenty two(I'd like to think I was younger , but sadly not) ,many a confused Indian adult of my era didn't understand, or didn't want to , or was too squeamish to consider consequences that intimate conversations in a warm last carriage of the last train could spawn.
Articulating desire tastefully, burdened by nonsensical, though hopelessly binding self imposed moral codes , is still a challenge. Then, one just didn't try.
So there we were at three in the dead of the night, meandering around long conversations without dead ends, me not being certain where it would take me(or us?).
Eventually at four , the train started to move and this made me anxious. I could sense the same in her, but I can be easily accused of seeing things that aren't if you knew me well enough.
Nothing breaks a spell like daylight. Dawn heightens the spell, only for the daylight to bring it crashing down with the attendant clarity and reminder of things to do like breakfasts to be had, clothes to be laundered, trains to be caught.
We reached Asakusa around five in the morning.  She had to go on to Ueno where she'd left her bags in a cloak room and then head to Kyoto.
On the platform, we exchanged email addresses and phone numbers and made promises to meet the next weekend at Asakusa for the annual fireworks which she said she was looking forward to.
We never met again. Promises made on railway platforms are rarely kept, very unlike what happened in a certain Linklater movie.
A couple of years later, out of the bleeding blue, she wrote to me asking how I was and asked me to visit Turin for the winter Olympics. This was the first I'd heard from her since we last saw each other. At twenty four, I knew a dead end when I saw one. I never replied.
That morning after Anna and her big boned friend left for Ueno by taxi, I decided to take a long walk through the familiar bylanes of Asakusa, now devoid of the usual throngs. I went to the shrine passing under the gate of thunder, Kaminarimon, and made a wish at the offering box and then went looking for a Denny's because pancakes drowning in maple syrup are the answers to most of the world's problems(not that I had any problems I intended to solve with their aid this early in the morning)
And, oh, my wish was answered a few years later, so maybe there's something there.

Monsoon mountains.

Inventory for a monsoon fortnight

Sandpaper - backpack backpouch
Tubes 6
Spoke spanner
Swiss knife
3 allenkeys
Puncture kit
Spanner
Chain links
btwin below seat pouch
Helmet
Rolson hammer
Cycle pump big
2 brake cables
5 gear cables
Sleeping bag
Bottle cage
brake shoe
Gel seat cover
Red cycling gloves
Sleeping neck pillow
Fleece gloves
Fleece scarf
Camping hat
Cycling shorts 2
Wilson pants
Disposable gloves
Rope
Rubber bands
Cleaning toothbrush
Miners lamp
Whistle
Towel
Torch
DYNAMO
6 tshirts Green screwdriver.
Jute turtleneck
Normal Shorts 2
Boxer 1
Underchunders 9
yomiuri giants towel
safety pins tablets
toothbrush
toothpaste
Cable ties
multi tool
Duct tape
insulation tape
spanner
Ashwin's Ayupatthichurna
Beret
Contact lens
Spare glasses
Columbia rain jacket.
Marquez and Updike
Camera
55 250 Tele
Tamron wide
2 flash cards
3 decks Playing cards

Shared from Google Keep

Prelude to an unexpected death in a mango orchard.

Sitting underneath a mango tree,
Eyes closed, counting stars in daylight.
Shafts of sunshine. Shimmering komorebi.
Distant sounds of a Ray Manzerak Moog solo,
Discordant night music around what might be noon.
The stars continue to fall from the sky, all make believe.
Shattering on the ground ,
Lying in glittering shards, bottles thrown by drunk Gods.
Her diaphanous muslin heart,
The osmotic quality of her treacherous love.
Permeating reality, obscuring imagination.
Heaving hurting lungfuls of humid tear soaked air.
Opening her eyes , eyelashes bunched,
she turned another page of her heavily marked Bell Jar.

As we dance to the masochism tango

Sliding down a rainbow, splashing into giant vats of cold liquid gold, we scream a happy breathless scream. We then run, bathed in gold into the cornfields, the fresh, dewy, ripe cobs whipping against our faces, us dripping gold. We swiftly ford an ankle deep stream running alongside two big friendly retrievers. One was named Fickle and the other Fuckface. No one told us that.We just knew. Fickle and Fuckface panted white wisps of heavy breath into early spring morning air. They chanced upon a fat rabbit and they broke off and chased it into the shrubs and all that remained of their presence were the gently settling stalks of dandelion that had been disturbed when they burst through the underbrush.
We ran along the stream until we came upon a sunny grassy knoll. We scrambled up and sat down to catch our breath, the fast drying gold now flaking finely on our faces and forearms. She prised out the gold dust under her fingernails with a little sharp twig. The sun shone warmer as she placed her palm across the back of my neck, flicking the back of my ear lobe gently with her thumb. We drank from the stream with cupped hands and washed all the gold off our faces, the gold forming a shimmering pool on the gently undulating surface.
She wanted to swim. I said I can't. She smiled and said she knew a spell which would help me. I said I didn't believe in spells. Her high timbre laugh rang out and she said that for a guy who'd just slid down a rainbow, I was strangely obtuse. I admitted she was right and asked her to teach me the magic words. She said she didn't want to swim anymore. This suited me just fine and I slept with my back against an oak tree, her hair sprawled on my lap. I dreamed of an ending to this dream. I wanted to ask her how it would all end. I didn't. It would only make her sad. I dreamed a foggy vale and Fickle and Fuckface, next to each other, silent and eager. I didn't see me. I didn't see her. I knew she'd left for a place called dawn where past, present and future are tangible and encumbered by reality.

The sun warmed my eyelids. The pressure cooker whistled softly and constantly. TV sounds. I woke up and as I brushed lazily , I decided I'd been reading too many of em blasted South Americans. Tom Lehrer's Masochism Tango played on the radio as I scrolled through the messages from her piled up over the night on my mobile phone. She had detailed her nightmares in them. I sighed as I replied that I'd call her in a while.

Conversations and a minor mishap foretold by K

K walked in an hour late. She usually was on time for our not frequent evenings together. So if she kept you waiting, you knew it was for a good reason and one not concerning you. This is a comforting thing to know.

Excerpts from a thread of conversation an hour and a carafe of the house red thereafter.

K : So if I understand correctly you've found yourself a Zelda who'll soon turn you from the Hemingway you think you are to the Scott Fitzgerald that you are.
Me: I'd rather you prefer a softer metaphor like Pattie Boyd ,Harrison and Clapton.
K : Train wrecks are train wrecks. I'll mince no words. I don't like the sound of her. She can't do you any good. You can't do you any good already and you could do with a little less of that.
Me: All this you conclude from my narrative about a woman I haven't yet met?
K: For all your faults, you make for a delightful teller of stories and coherently interpolated narratives from distant observation points with little standard deviation to the actual event set.
Me : Your statistical methods degree hasn't ever served you better than in that sentence.
K: I measure people by means of standard deviance.
Me: You are the outlier?
K: I agree to meet you on a weekend I was supposed to do my taxes. I must be.
Me: You do know you are hard to unlove.
K: I try not to be. Getting back to the issue at hand, you have to start believing me, that you shouldn't be feeling the way you are until you've waded shin deep in the waters. Not when all you have is a hint of moisture in the air.
Me: K, It's not so bad. She's just a girl who probably is no different from you. I'll never know if I don't go looking or wading or whatever metaphor you choose to use. Besides it's almost rude not to.
K: No. I am definitely prettier and I'll never be your girl.
Me: But you are already.
K: Shut up and finish those mushrooms. You want more olives?
Me: Yeah. Feta too.
K: How long do you think I'm gonna be the gangman pushing levers and breaking my freshly painted fingernails to shepherd your train away from tracks leading into imagined sunsets?
Me: K, I think I'll take my chances here. What's the worse that could happen?
K: The sooner you men realize that all you are looking for is a warm bosom to cry into and stop over analyzing obscure micro poetry and demagoguery, the better. Stop grinning. I can't wait to tell you I told you so, the next time we catch up.
Me: I'm trying hard not to. I'm also slightly worried that one of these days I will end up as a character in that novella you are writing and I am wrongly portrayed as the person I'm not.
K: I could do worse and write about you as the person you are.
Me: You are hard to unlove, K.So damn hard.

We ran through another carafe and it was a fine fine December night that we walked back to the familiar lanes of forgotten childhood games and then on to our respective homes.

I called K today, almost two months since the day we last met, and told her she may have been right about some things she told me about over the two carafes.
She spared me the 'I told you so's(she never 'I told you so'd me ) and asked me if I had made any plans yet for the spring break I usually took in March and how she was looking forward to my photographs.
That's why she is hard to unlove.

Rain and lost penguins

Rain gentle, rain slow,
On dusty petals and the death row.

Rain whispers, rain screams,
On dirty frilly misshapen dreams.

Rain sway, rain pour,
Wash away poets in righteous uproar.

Rain cry, rain weep,
On every castle, every keep.c

Rain fast, rain anew ,
On speeding trains' strained sinew.

Rain cats, rain dogs,
Drown little ants under logs.

Rain riot,rain ruin,
On that desert bound penguin.
 
Rain rain, rain rain
RAIN RAIN, RAIN RAIN.


PS:Rhymes are for fogies. Remember, you are a fucking Imagist.
PPS: Ok.Whatever.

Chapter 1: Wednesday Evening 4PM

It was a cold day. Late winter. Early spring. Not freezing ,just cold. Enough to make him want to reach into his backpack and retrieve his well worn fleece jacket. The cuffs of which were beginning to fray.There were coffee stains on the breast pocket from an ill timed sneeze .The kind that comes on suddenly. Without warning

.

He had caught the train(the only train) from Kirishima early in the morning.  The station master had told him that it would depart at 9:39 in the morning when he ran into him closing the ticket window the previous night. He spent the night in a ryokan amidst a wooded enclave upon a hill with a steeply winding gravel path. The tatami was spotless and he slept soundly through straw flavored dreams in a town where time ceased to matter. Except for the little matter of the only train out.
But that was a long time ago.He had boarded the train which, true to the station master's word, departed at the appointed minute and slithered down the mountain side in a breathless run. Quite unlike the restless diesels from his childhood at home, a long way away.

Now he was at the coast. Kagoshima. And he could see the Sakurajima across the straits.The volcano was silent. No ash belching fissures. Not even a steam trail. He felt cheated. 

His three weeks in Kyushu were drawing to a close. Three weeks of slow trains, mountain huts, naked bulbs, moonscapes, freezing (not just cold) nights, and hallucinations involving Fibonacci series, prime numbers and mythical sea gods of ancient Japan. This was as far south as he intended to travel. He needed to find a night bus out of Kagoshima to Fukuoka. He would thus save on the night's stay at an antiseptic urban inn with hand sanitizers. Monogrammed towels too.

It was close to four in the evening. The bus station was a mile away . In spite of the chill, a stubborn film of sweat formed on his forehead as he followed the signboards to the bus stop.

“Evening. Do the buses to Fukuoka depart from here?”
“Yeah. It’s a good six and a half hours away.”
"Six and a half hours you say?", he confirmed with the face at the ticket window.
"Yes. The next is at six and we have one leave every three hours hence"
"Do you have any seats left on the midnight bus?"
"Let's see", he said, adjusting his bifocals with his gloved right hand and gingerly typing into his console with one finger of his left. "The bus is mostly empty. I'll recommend the aisle seat down by the emergency exit. More room to wiggle your toes there.", he said with a practiced furrow of his brows.
"Thanks. That would be my seat then".
"For 4800 yen it is all yours"
He paid up.
"That's your ticket.And it departs at 12:05 to be precise".A gloved hand pressed the ticket and the change into his.
"Thanks."
"You have a lot of time to kill before you are warm inside the bus".
"I'll potter around"
"You could try the pachinko joint around the corner"
"Too noisy for my tastes.Thanks anyways"
"Well good evening to you then" ,he said with an air of disappointment. Mildly aggrieved.

On his way down from the railway station, he had passed by a cinema. It had been a while since he had been to one. He headed back in the general direction of the cinema, this time taking a longer detour keeping to the coast road for most part. An old street car rumbled by on well worn tracks. Gulls and people fluttered past.

The cinema was one of those which had been built in a hurry in the bubble boom of the nineties. Three screens and a 24 hour Denny's. He went into the diner.

"Pancakes and maple syrup, please"
"Good choice sir", the waitress chirped
"Cant go wrong with pancakes.Can we?"
She smiled awkwardly.
"Coffee to go?"
"Uroncha"
"There is a dispenser by the slot machine. You can help yourself. It's free .Your pancakes will be served in 15 minutes"
"Take your time. I am in no hurry"
She smiled awkwardly again. Like she had something more to say. She hurried back to the counter and punched in his order.

The cinema schedules were on a crumpled flyer weighed down by a salt shaker.   
He had two choices. A movie about a bunch of tiresome school kids swimming from Kagoshima to Sakurajima (the trailers had been running on NHK for a while now) .The second was My Blueberry Nights(took a while for him to figure out the katakana for Blueberry). Norah Jones and Jude Law. Not much of a choice. There next was a show at nine. 

Towards the end of a long journey, time expands. It wasn’t even half past five yet. He fished out a book . Soon he was lost in painfully little details about life in Sorbonne, Sartre, Beauvoir, Paris. Another tome penned by another American trying to ascribe allusions of literary respectability to his sense of self worth in the backstreets of St.Germain living on a wired allowance and cheap pernod. He had picked up the book in a sale at the Blue Parrot Bookstore a few minutes’ walk from the Takadanobaba station on the Yamanote line in Tokyo. He left at eight and headed upstairs to the booking office. He left a larger than usual tip.

The elevator had seen better days. It shuddered as it rose up the shaft. Someone had scribbled “Tanaka for Emperor” and someone else “Akita women are best” on the inside. He had been to Akita. He had no reason to agree. Or disagree. The door opened and he walked into a foyer with a “Ticket Counter” sign pointing to the left.   

He turned left into a carpeted corridor and walked past movie posters before reaching an unnecessarily placed revolving door.

Pushing hard at the glass door he walked in.

Of Hand Written Labels on Second Hand Records

July was drawing to a nondescript close. Like a short story, skimmed over after a couple of paragraphs. That the writer was famous and usually quoted to mask one's own literary shortcomings did not matter. The rain had stopped beating down an hour ago. There were little pools in the gutters which waited for the sun to liberate them at daybreak.  For now, they sat there rippling silently, reflecting the glow of speeding tail lights of tired cars.

He walked alone. Occasionally, droplets shaken off leaves by a mild but persistent wind and blown his way settled in a cool spray on his face. A movers' truck trundled by, weighed down by old teak furniture and collective sighs and memories of a family moving to a new city and a new home. The warm engine only made the late evening chill hit harder as it moved away and around the bend onto the busier roads. He hunched his shoulders up and shivered briefly and uncontrollably.

He was now walking past the rows of government housing. Identical boxes differing only in door numbers. The pavement had been pushed right to the walls of the houses in a recent road widening exercise. He passed a bathroom window with shadows playing on frosted grime coated glass slats. Someone was showering. The water gurgled down into drains in a steady flow. Steam mixed with scents of a cheap familiar soap poured out of the window lit hazily by a low wattage naked electric bulb struggling to penetrate the translucence. He walked past taking care not to stop and look through the gaps in the slats through which he could see the moldy damp roof which hadn't seen a painters brush for a long time.

He wiped the dampness off his beard with his palm and quickened his pace. A hot shower and a drink would do just fine, he thought to himself. He rarely drank alone. Today he would.Like one of those people in Hemingway's Men Without Women.But they were all better men than he ever hoped to be.

He reached the gate and fumbled in his pockets for the key. The land lady locked the gate at 11 every night. The Great Dane was loose. It was big but harmless . He never really trusted it or it him .  He tiptoed past the dog onto the stairs to his lodgings two floors above. He walked past the open bedroom window of the couple staying on the first floor.The window was open, and the curtains were flapping gently. The ceiling fan creaked familiarly. They stopped whispering when they heard his footsteps coming up and they started again as they heard them going away upwards.

After the shower, he sat by the window with a bottle of dark Caribbean rum on his teak rocking chair. Caramel infused rum. The rain had resumed when he was in the shower. Sometime later, one of the couple switched off the ceiling fan. He was not sure who, though he guessed it was the man. He seemed to have an unhealthy pallor of one who was always on the verge of catching a cold or a whichever fever was the flavour of the season. He poured some more rum into his glass.

He switched on his record player. He had picked up a scratched record in a garage sale with a red colored label on which with a fountain pen someone had carefully written "Recitations of poems of T.S.Eliot". The E in the Eliot was smudged by a drop of water, probably condensation dripping off a glass of single malt whiskey and ice or a silent tear of a once pretty woman slowly and irreversibly going to fat. An anonymous but a now familiar voice flowed out of the horn, as he gently placed the needle on the tracks. As the rough voice intoned "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock", he sat back staring into the dim streets and distant silhouettes sipping his rum. He sat there remembering the nights when one realized that it soon would be daybreak by the uncertain first light of dawn creeping in and gently outlining the contours of the fall of her back. And when she turned over, her chest gently rise, gently fall.

He fell asleep with an open bottle, a glass with dregs of the last drink and distant voices from a second hand record mingling seamlessly with more real ones from a not too far past.
 

Istanblues - Haydarpaşa version

 Haydarpaşa had been sleeping for longer than he cared to remember. It was that kind of day. He stretched on the ledge and then rubbed himself against the earthen pot of thyme. The mild fragrance of fishes and spices emanating from the pot made him purr quietly. Bayram liked his potted plants. He watered them  twice a day in summer. Once at noon, once more at nightfall. 
Once every seven sunsets Bayram walked down from Beyoğlu to the Eminönü seaside market. He always walked right down to the farthest end of the market, where the fish was freshest.  When the fish was eaten he would pour the basin of water with which he had cleaned the fishes along with the leftovers into the pots. He was always  a little partial to the thyme. 

Bayram was older than the other humans he saw every day.  He was also a lot quieter than them.  The only time he remembered him talking at a little more than a whisper was when many full moons ago, Bayram missed his visits to the Eminönü market for two full moons. Bayram lay in bed hot as a freshly baked Simit. A man in a white coat came every two sunsets to check if he had cooled down yet and gave him vile smelling syrups which Bayram steadfastly refused to drink.
It was one of those nights when Bayram had screamed as if his soul was leaving him and then for one entire day, he kept up a steady stream of loud and frantic monologue until the man in white coat put him to sleep with a mysterious needle.  
The worst part was that he, a housecat had to, for entire two full moons, scrounge in the litter bins that lined İstiklâl Street with the other destitute cats, who spoke a crude and vulgar version of the Cat tongue and had no names.  It was horrifying to have to live on what they refused to eat.  He knew better than to pick a fight with them when more than one of them sneered and hissed at him. He, who had mastered two human tongues as well as any other cat in living memory had mastered, silently glowered as he skirted their territories.
Then at night as he lay on the ledge with a barely filled stomach, he fantasized about strutting majestically with his flowing black mane into a gang of those stringy and mangy cretin  and letting them know in no uncertain terms why they would never know what it was to listen to and understand whom the humans called Johnny Cash. What it felt like to shudder everytime he heard Bayram play Folsom Prison Blues and hear the prisoners primal cheer when Cash‘s baritone rang out  “ I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die” . He sometimes wondered if even Bayram understood Cash. 

Bayram’s umbrella was by the railing. He never left home without it. He probably was sitting by the window in the bedroom in his ancient rocking chair, his shaggy brows furrowed and his eyes closed. Haydarpaşa jumped down and felt his joints shudder with a dull pain as he landed on the hard stone.  He regretted not having stretched some more. It was still a few shadow lengths to sunset.  He decided to head down to the quieter stretch of sea south of the Galata Bridge though the lanes of Cihangir. He could see the lights of the Aya Sofia in the distance and the minarets of the Blue Mosque as he walked steadily downhill keeping to the lanes without cars and children. The cars could kill you and the children could do worse.

Haydarpaşa rarely made the journey to the other side of Istanbul. Eminönü was as far as he ventured on his own on most evenings he wanted to learn more words of the human tongues. Some human words were prettier than others. His favorite name was Dolores ,his favorite word was tinkle and he hated pulchritude. He remembered almost all of the days he actually did cross the Galata Bridge.

He remembered the last cold winds ,what the humans called winter (another word he liked), when the streets and rooftops had turned white, like in the fairy tales from a distant land called Simricina .Sirckeci, his uncle, had in the ancient cat tongue of Amezaara ,with an occasional cursory translation into Cimranza which cats in this part of the world spoke, in a trancelike state, described to him the mountains of Simricina on the last day of the growing moon, where the ancient cat king Izmirana went to pursue Axamandreu, the kidnapper of his beautiful salt and pepper maned Parmarin queen Elara . Haydarpaşa did not remember the words but the staccato images had stayed in his head. Amezaara had probably died with Sirckeci ,who was allegedly pushed off the Galata by a human young. Are you surprised that the Cat fairy tales are no different from the human fairy tales? I wonder why?

Coming back to the day he decided to cross the Bosphorus on one such cold day when it snowed for previous three sunsets without respite. However on this winter day, the sun was out and everything was sparkling. He had ventured into a side street with a café where humans with narrow eyes spoke in a strange tongue he failed to place. New languages were difficult to pick as one grows old. Next to the café with the strange race of people there was a hotel with two people,a man and a woman with a cigarette and a glass of tea.  He gingerly stepped into the snow and crossed the street to where they were and the woman patted his head and went inside and then in a while reappeared with a saucer of cold milk and placed it in front of Haydarpaşa. He drank it in evenly spaced slurps. A passerby waved and the woman said hello. He could see that she was just learning the language. It was thickly accented. The woman said she had to go to the Police station and patted Haydarpaşa on the head and threw her cigarette butt into the snow. The man said, she would be better off staying until the snow cleared. She said, she had made an appointment and pulled up her parka and left. Haydarpaşa quickly finished his saucerful and followed her at a safe distance. She seemed to know the place well. Haydarpaşa would have picked exactly the same turns she took to get across the bridge. She walked past the simit baker, turned at the coffee store where people were still lined up inspite of the chill, down  what seemed to be a dead end alley, went down a flight of stairs which opened into the Galata tower courtyard and then down the walkway to reach the Eminönü side of the Galata bridge. She crossed the bridge her head held close to her chest and her parka pulled close. The sun had disappeared behind a tuft of cloud and the Haydarpaşa wondered if he should turn back home. He continued to follow the woman. She crossed over to where the Spice Bazaar was and then turned up a hill skirting the main streets and turned into a street leading to the Topkapi after crossing the tramlines. A couple more turns and she stood there transfixed staring at the sky. Haydarpaşa keeping to the shadows cast by the trees and moving as only cats can move unseen was soon at the same square. In the evening sun, he saw for the first time, the snowed over dome of the Aya Sofia, bathed in a golden light . The minarets were refusing to let the snow settle on them, and at the foot of each, a mound had accumulated. The dome however, massive and gently curved, intricately textured held the snow together and the crystals refracted the evening light into splinters of color.  Axamandreu  may as well have been holding Elara hostage in one of those minarets.  She looked for a place to sit down, but did not find a bench nearby. Where she stood in the snow, a little slush pool was starting to form.  She reluctantly walked towards the Police station and then disappeared into the brick building.

Haydarpaşa waited at the square. Many people walked out, but she never did. He waited until his shadow was so long that it would soon die away. Maybe she was Elara and Axamandreu was indeed holding her inside now.

He turned around and walked back to the bridge and down to the Eminönü, where he watched the sun set behind the skyline and walked back to Beyoğlu the same way he had come earlier in the day.

But this was many moons ago. He occasionally visited the hotel next to the café, but he never saw her again. Haydarpaşa continued to walk down to the summer sea through Cihangir and then in a wide circle returned to his favorite ledge where surely Bayram had placed a saucer of milk. As he did every sunset.

Bayram was playing an old scratchy record of a man known as Chuck Berry. As he did every time he was happy.

Haydarpaşa went into room and leapt onto Bayram’s lap and purred. And as he purred he thought to himself.
Bayram has no secrets. Haydarpaşa has many.

 

Of once pretty palaces and bells that still chime

A quiet but insistent knock on the door woke him up. The ceiling fan was still creaking like a clipped metronome. The curtains were flapping soundlessly to the beat. It was an old curtain, washed many times over. The sun shone through the outlines of a faded rendering of a tiger roaring mid leap on the calico.

The knock again.

He stepped off the bed.The clock needles said 9:40 or was it 8:40. 9:40. The floor was cooler than it was yesterday. He opened the door.
"Breakfast closing at 10. You want something?", the 15 year old Marathi receptionist,concierge,cook of the Gangaram Hotel, Bhuj asked him.
"Scrambled egg and toast",he said.
"Wanting tea or coffee?"
"Tea. I know the farmers in Vidharbha are in the red, but go easy on the sugar"
"Jee sir", he smiled."Wanting hot water?, Cold day today, one bucket for twenty rupees"
"Ok.Bring it up after my breakfast is done. Will come down in a while"
"Maria madam already there", he said with a smile and walked back down to the kitchen.

Maria Joao was at the table reading the paper framed against the doorway. A gentle drizzle had started sometime not too long before.
"Good morning",she said adjusting her shawl which she had wrapped around her shoulder.
"Morning. Late start?"
"Yes. Will take it easy for the next couple of days.Plan to leave next week to the weaver village"

Maria was from Portugal. A graphic design graduate learning block printing techniques from the local artisans in the villages around Bhuj.
She spoke slowly, rolling her syllables with care.Also, she was pretty.
They had met at the dinner table the night before.An Italian photographer and a tall Dutch woman on a Sabbatical who were there for dinner were not to be seen.
They had talked of Sicily and Sicilians and how Maria's sister had wanted to marry a Sicilian she had met. In the end she decided not to, after meeting the prospective mother-in-law.
He had never been to Sicily. He wanted to go to Sicily.

"What about you?",she asked.
"Yup.Lazy weather day.Plan to go down to the Paraag Mahal a bit later in the day.
"Hmm.. was there with some friends a while ago, but the entrance charges for foreigners is outrageously expensive."
"Any good?"
"Creepy, if anything..",she said after much thought.
"We'll see..", he said, sipping the milky tea.

It was nearly two when he decided to go to the Palace complex. The hotel was right next door to the walls. The air was moist and the streets wet. Every now and then a droplet would land on the back of his neck. He followed the wall until he came to the gate.

A sign pointed to the right "For buy ticket".
A signboard said that the Palace was built in the 1879. Italian Gothic. A functional Bell tower.One of the three functional British era bell towers in the country.

All around were signs of the Great Bhuj quake, which everyone mentioned once in conversations he had had since he was here .Spidery cracks on the facade. A lopsided tower.

The palace was closed till three. The rubble from Bhuj quake had still not been cleared from the complex. It had over the course of the nine years blended into the forlorn, though not entirely depressing surroundings. Pipal trees were starting to take root among the fallen bricks. The bricks were redder than usual because of the rain. A disused well with a pulley lay to one end. A truck load of sand had been carelessly dumped nearby.
A little girl was busy tunneling into the sand with both hands. Each little hand carefully extracting a scoop of sand from either side in tandem.After every scoop she took time to smoothen the walls with her little palms. Every three or four scoops she wiped the sweat from her sandy brow.She paused for the while to check either end. Soon they would meet. She decided to take it one end at time now.

He decided to walk around until someone arrived. Soon someone arrived.
The gatekeeper.

"What time does it open?"
"Check the board. It says three"

The girl had completed her tunnel and after a pat down on the insides stood back to admire her handiwork. She was now deciding on whether to make a new tunnel to the left or the right of the current one.

"Whats inside?", he asked the gatekeeper.
"See for yourself. Just another 20mins to go".

A red sedan which had seen a brighter coat of paint rolled in. Tourists. A newly married couple got off and the man said something terse to the driver.Honeymoon.Both had their shades on. It was cloudy, so the whole world probably looked like an under-exposed photograph to them.
They came down to where he stood and asked the gatekeeper for the tickets.

"Look here.", the gatekeeper said pointing to the signboard.
The wife pulled at the husbands arm as he glared at the man through his shades. They soon found a convenient fallen pillar to take each others' pictures on, with the rubble as the backdrop. Shortly the husband walked over to him and asked if he would be "So kind as to " take their photograph.
He said yes. He took two photographs. One with the shades and one without.

They walked back together to the door. Shortly a man in an old uniform walked down to the desk at the gate with a steel box in hand.
Soon, the palace was open for business. The gatekeeper stared into the rubble with a disturbed expression for a while and then walked to the well to smoke a beedi.

The palace was as Maria had described. The corridors were wet and slippery. The couple was on their way out by the time he entered the main hall. Obviously, the decor and tenor of the place didn't go well with what they had in mind for a honeymoon. He now had the entire palace to himself.
He went into a room with a stuffed tiger whose fur was now starting to get moldy.There was one room which obviously was the bedroom with full length mirrors. The silver coating had worn off in large patches. The furnishing was distinctly European. He walked into the once definitely magnificent durbar hall. More tigers, buffaloes and antelope heads. Two buckets had been placed to catch the water leaking from a damp patch next to the crystal chandelier. Big drops sploshed into the almost full buckets every once in a while. The stained glass windows fresh after the drizzle filled the far end with dewy light. Red.Blue.Yellow.Green.

He loitered around the hall, looking for a good angle to photgraph and gave up after a few attempts. He walked up the stairway to the bell tower.The bells rang every fifteen minutes.One chime for each quarter and then ringing the number for each hour. Soon it would be four. he scrambled up the stairs to be in time. On the roof at one end was the Hamirsar and a cool breeze was blowing in from there. The tower had been hastily patched up and held rather precariously with assorted scaffolding and pillar support. He walked up the claustrophobic spiral stairway and stood above the assortment of bells, ropes and gears.
Sure enough, at four, the gongs rang out, the oiled metal and wood creaked, the ropes were pulled and with a rearrangement of gears to chime out five strokes the next hour, the tower fell silent.
He stood for a while staring into the tiled roofs of the palace watching pigeons dart in and out secret cubbyholes and cracks left open by the quake.
The sun was now out. He wondered if the tunnel still held up with the dampness fast drying away in the western Sun.

He stood there for a long time. Soon he heard footsteps. A balding head popped out of the stairway followed by a girl in her late teens in a dress she would start hating in a while. After another few minutes, a matronly woman of forty panted out of the stairway and she stood against the railing catching her breath. He walked down the stairway and went back to the entrance.

The gatekeeper was still standing by the well.
He walked down to him.
"So how long have you been working here", he asked.
He shrugged and threw his stub into the well and lit another one.
"Longer than I care to remember."
"Is the palace maintained by the ASI?"
"Nope. The trust runs it. The Maharaja's trust"
"They dont seem to be doing much from the looks of it"
"My grandfather was a halwai in the kings kitchen. He used to say that the King had an ugly queen but a lovely palace.He should have seen it now"
"Hmm... There's water leaking in the darbar hall"
"I placed the buckets myself", he said,"The present Maharaja is a mad man. Ego. Britain, France, America had all said they would pay to renovate the palace.But the man wont listen. He says, he will bring the palace to it's rightful place but not with an Englishman's money. Baawala ho gaya hai sala" ..and after a pause "Poori duniya Baawli ho gayi hai" and walked off.

He stood by the well for some time. The red walls were now glowing, the water slowly drying.
He turned to walk down back to the town.


The little girl was nowhere to be seen. All that remained were two tunnels with damp,darker sand on the entrances and a lazy dog sunning himself on the heap.
Another sedan pulled into the gates and passed him, splashing his shoes, riding over a shimmering early evening puddle.

He cursed silently and walked to the gates. "Poori duniya baawli ho gayi hai"