A ‘King’ reminisces

I close my eyes. And I am instantly transported back to one nippy winter evening six years ago; exact to a day; when the bright city lights struggle vainly to cope with the rapidly vanishing twilight. I am on my way to get married.

Sandwiched between two septuagenarian relatives, in traditional attire clutching a topor (bride-groom headgear), I squirm uncomfortably in the back seat of a car. Oblivious to my plight the two gentlemen next to me harangue about politics and caught in the cross-fire I can only smile and nod politely. Drawn to the floral decorations adorning the car, occupants in a taxi gawk at me when we stop at a red-light. I console myself by thinking that I would have done exactly the same thing had I been in the taxi.

We finally reach our destination. Everyone climbs out of the car but I am instructed to stay seated. Apparently people are not prepared for such an early arrival; some scamper around, others reach frantically for their cell phones while I glance at my watch in some confusion (only later do I learn the reason for their consternation; the bride is still at a beauty parlor getting ready and indeed as I come to discover in due course, the virtue of timeliness is not exactly worshipped at my in-laws home.) I finally step out, the flash bulbs go off, conch shells blow, ululation drowns out all conversation and I become an instant celebrity complete with a red-carpet leading up to a covered dais where a grand throne awaits me. I feel a bit giddy and my chest swells with pride yet I shuffle slowly to my throne, mindful of my crisp new dhuti (loincloth.) Although it’s readymade and securely tied, it’s the first time I am wearing one and ‘Better safe than sorry’ is my mantra for the day.

People come and greet me and I am introduced to friends, aunts, uncles, grandfathers, cousins, neighbors, office colleagues and so on —I try to keep a smile on my face (something that does not easily come to me I must admit and my jaws start aching soon). My smile turns a notch smaller when I hear a wife nudge her husband and whisper “Why is the bor (groom) looking so gloomy? Because from now on he has to obey his wife”, the husband wisecracks.

Just when I start to feel like a King holding court and daresay start enjoying the show (or is it my show I wonder?) someone hands me a bag with another fresh dhuti to put on. Triumphantly I look around for my Mama (Mom’s cousin brother) to whom I have delegated the intricacies of tying my dhuti, but he is nowhere to be seen. My smile deserts me temporarily and I dispatch one of my minions in a search and rescue mission. Murphy’s Law notwithstanding, I finally spot my Mama in the crowd giving me a reassuring nod. I am led off backstage but can’t find an empty room to complete the task so we pick a room, shoo the guests off and with one underling standing guard at the door, my Mama helps me put on the dhuti (this time not readymade I notice with some initial alarm). But I have chosen well, for my Mama is up to the challenge and soon I’m back onstage beaming with new found confidence.

Thereafter the real ceremony starts; first we have the pantomime of the boron (welcoming the groom) ceremony where middle-aged women circle me with decorated trays in hand, followed by the bride being carried in on a pidi (low wooden stool) by the bride’s brothers her face covered in a big betel leaf. We finally sit around the yagna (sacred fire) and I look skeptically at a baby faced, callow looking purohit (priest) but his voice belies his appearance and soon I am chanting incomprehensible (at least to me) mantras and pouring ghee into the fire. I ask a question to my future wife but she looks at me blankly much to my alarm (again later I discover the reason for her indifference—as per dictates of custom she has a big supari (nut) stuffed in her mouth and can only mumble). Someone gifts me a watch and with no pocket to stuff it in, I have no option but to wear it and the photographers record the incongruous sight of me wearing two watches on my left hand for posterity, much to my chagrin.

The night wears on and all ceremonies over I’m asked to check out the guests as they eat. I walk around and everyone stops eating when I arrive, chairs appear out of thin air and people make compassionate noises about how long I haven’t eaten with no fewer than three people scurrying off when I ask for a glass of water. I feel like a King again and start tucking into some delectable biryani with gusto when one particularly devious looking young lady slides up to me and whispers in my ear “Jamaibabu (son-in-law of the house) all of us cousins are waiting for you in the Bashor ghor (bridal room). When will you be joining us?” The biryani suddenly starts tasting insipid.

I open my eyes and quote Shakespeare: ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’. Even if it’s for just one day, I muse.

Kolkata!

Having been an itinerant IT professional for the past ten years now, I’ve often been asked the question: What constitutes the spirit of Kolkata? What strange blood courses through the veins of this city giving it a distinct character of its own? Is it the strong emotions of passion, fear and exhilaration or a sense of refinement and sophistication in the fine arts that makes it stand out?  I’ve thought about it deeply but the answers slips through my mind like sand through a closed fist, the harder you try to grasp them the faster they disappear, elusive and mystical, buried deep somewhere in the cavernous pits of time and history.

Yet paradoxically as you attempt to discern the spirit of Kolkata you start by listing list the ills that befall Kolkata; the chaotic traffic, the pot-holed roads, the crumbling infrastructure, the debilitating weather, the irascible crowds, the notion that nothing gets done in Kolkata, I could go on and on. But despite all these backbreaking odds the people of Kolkata still know how to enjoy, love and celebrate, finding their elixir in the spirit of Kolkata that lights up the lives of all its residents cutting across barriers of race, religion and class alike. But what is it really?

Is it the spirit of Kolkata that drives people to watch an East Bengal-Mohan Bengal football match under a pulsing mid-summer sun? Is it in the haggling over the price of ilish in a slippery, dank and crowded fish market? Is it in eating that greasy kati-roll in the ubiquitous roadside eatery? Is it in enjoying a languid early summer evening laced with a refreshingly cool breeze; the harbinger of a kal-baisakhi? Is it in having endless cups of tea in a bhad over raucous adda with friends? Is it in indulging yourself in a delicious puchka ignoring the dubious origins of the jol while on a shopping spree in New Market? Is it in enjoying a cricket match on TV at home on a languorous hot summer’s bandh afternoon after a lunch of mangshor jhol topped of with mishit doi? Is it in strolling down College Street hunting that rare boi? Is it in loosing yourself in the milling crowds at Maddox Square trying to catch a glimpse of Ma Durga on a balmy Navami evening? Is it in taking a morning walk in the Maidan on a misty winter morning? Is it in playing cricket and badminton in a bagan-bari picnic in the pale winter sun? Is it in having a Christmas plum cake with family and friends at Flury’s on Park Street? Is it in sharing a drink with friends in a snooty British era club where once only the pukka shabibs were admitted? Is it in ordering that extra hot jhalmuri as the train approaches Howrah station? Or is it in beating the crowds to buy that much sought after book drenched in the dust and madness of the boi-mela? Or is it simply in the fact that no matter how tightly you put on your monkey cap to beat the chill it simply cannot match the warmth and affection of our pishima’s and mashima’s who won’t rest until you have tasted the last morsel they have so lovingly cooked all day long just for you?

Like a freeze frames in a movie these images flash past me in quick succession, each shot unique yet connected, bound together by some invisible thread. But before I get carried away we all have to face the sobering truth as well--- no matter how you put it, Kolkata is a city in decline—even though geographically speaking it might be expanding but in the minds and thoughts of many people it’s shrinking. It’s already a shadow of its former self being burned and singed in the vitriolic brand of politics being played out today; businesses are fleeing and investors are hesitant; the best and brightest brains have already left for greener pastures elsewhere. The glitzy façade of malls and residential complexes do little to hide the grinding poverty of the slums; its educational institutions are in a state of disrepair; the acrid smog in the winter evenings cloaks the city choking all and the ever expanding city boundaries devour verdant fields with roads, water and sewer facilities unable to keep pace with the frenetic pace of growth.

Yet the spirit of Kolkata lives on inside me as I’m sure it does in a number of others who have been touched by it in one way or the other; part nostalgia, part wistfulness, part longing for times gone and above all a sense of wonder at the resilience of the human spirit to overcome all odds, no matter how daunting or insurmountable they appear to be.

Stepping Stones.....

"So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free …..."

J K Rowling, Harvard Alumni Association, Commencement Address, 2008.

I had stumbled upon the You Tube video of this speech one soporific weekend afternoon but soon I was intrigued and twenty minutes later I was wide awake. Coming from the woman who had created Harry Potter, I thought that the main motif of her speech would be to extol the virtues of the power of imagination but in the end I felt she had said something even more profound which I least expected.  

She talked about failure. Yes, early on in her life, by her own admission, she had failed, but paradoxically that failure was more valuable to her than her remarkable success later on in life. I had always heard of the saying ‘Failures are stepping stones to success” but I had accepted it as a truism without being been able to fully relate to it personally. However when she started talking about the effects of failure and what failure does to a person was I finally able understand the true meaning with startling familiarity. And as she said “Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it”. As a young student I had failed to clear an important examination and I had let the world decide that I had failed. As a consequence I was left wallowing in periods of self-pity, self-doubt and diffidence at a crucial crossroad in life. I did not realize it then but as I reflect on it now, that failure helped steer me in the right direction for I was set free as she points out so eloquently—set free from doing something I really did not want to do and more importantly set free to do what I actually wanted to do.

I won’t try and amplify more on what she said. Just read/watch it and be your own judge. 

The link can be found here. Its certainly finds it place as one of my most my treasured bookmarks.  

Nine Lives...

Looking for something different to read during a recent staycation at home (yes that is a neologism or a newly coined word that I stumbled upon and it means taking a break but staying at home J), I had ordered a copy of ‘Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India’ by William Dalrymple from Amazon.com with some trepidation to say the least. My Facebook status reflected my apprehensions: “Religion and Spiritualism have always daunted me and I’ve consciously shied away from reading such books ….”

But the more I read the book (I’m not done yet) the more I feel that it is a tale of nine remarkable men and women set against the backdrop of an unsettled India grappling with change rather than some dreary theological discourse. The stories chronicle the lives of ordinary men and women who have devoted their lives in the search of God, who have willingly given up lives of luxury and comfort for paths of self-mortification and have detached themselves from all worldly possessions in the quest for the ultimate.

Surprisingly enough though, they aren’t associated with cults and rituals of mainstream Hinduism or Islam but on the contrary practice their own brand of faith that sometimes completely inverts the norms of conventional religion. Disturbingly however, their numbers continue to dwindle as the capacious folds of contemporary Hinduism and Islam threaten to swallow these unique and sometimes extreme practices in the subcontinent.

Some examples include: The Jain nun who had her hair plucked out strand by strand so that she could be accepted as a monk only to see her powers of self detachment tested when her closest friend ritually starves herself to death; the tantric woman who comes to live in the cremation grounds of Tarapith after failing to find love and acceptance in the city; the Buddhist monk who is forced renounce his vows and take up arms against the invading Chinese only to writhe in self-remorse later; the Devdasi woman suffering from AIDS who forces her children into prostitution thinking its her divine duty; the thrice displaced woman refugee who finally finds love and acceptance in the syncretic views of Sufism in a remote village in Sindh; the Rajasthani folk singer who memorizes a 4000 line poem to perform all night long---all are very personal and emotionally charged stories that strike a chord and ask uncomfortable questions.

What makes these people choose the path that defies conventional wisdom? Are they the truly enlightened ones? Are they driven by some divine power that makes them renounce everything? And what do they get in return? Freedom from endless cycles of birth and rebirth? Nirvana? Moksha? Lesser mortals like me can only read and wonder.