Train journey nostalgia

It's just a train journey. 

Unless you're part of a not-so-elite club of 90s kids for whom long train journeys were when we finally believed that the vacation was on. A train journey was all it took to move from school, homework and household chores to the carefree village home where Nani cooked everything you loved to eat and scolded your mother for scolding you. To the towns on banks of rivers that were still clean enough for a sneaky dip when daddy wasn't looking and then hiding behind Dadi when he tried to explain to you why that's a sure-shot recipe to catching a summer cold. To being pampered.

Train journeys often connected our city existence to our town royalty. We were the raja betas and darlings of the extended family and the increase in our weight over the summer was a sign of just how much love had been poured into our food with the ghee. 

I know it wasn't like this for many of my friends. Summers for them were never picking mangoes from other people's orchards. But maybe you can see a little bit of what that guilt free haven felt like to a child. And you can imagine how the train journey became our personal cupboard to Narnia.

Even if it wasn't the ritual summer holiday train, it always took you someplace new. You sat by the window, trying to count the trees flashing you by. There was so much to learn - about brick kilns and seasonal crops, irrigation canals and scarecrows, parched land and river bridges - so much to see, and question. I still remember trying to understand why the wide Brahmaputra was a river and not a sea, because you surely could not see its other bank from one end. Or how Sangam was a confluence of not two but three rivers. I remember how different the Konkan railway scenery was from the Bombay-UP one.

When you're one of those 'my-parents-have-a-transferrable-job' kids, you grow up all over the country. 'Back home' becomes your centre and train journeys run along a radius to each new place. Your first lesson in landscapes, agriculture and people comes not from Geography textbooks but from train windows. 

So does your first lesson in human relationships and love, because sometimes trains took you away from cities you loved and had lived in for years. You stand at the door of your coach, waving goodbye to the band of family and friends at the station until you can see them no more. Teary-eyed and with a heavy heart, you wonder if the new place will ever be as good as the old one. It's the gentle humming of the wheels on rail that rock your little body to sleep on these journeys.

And of course, you have your journey constants. The dip-dip waali chai, cutlet and samosas.The choices in breakfast. Watching your parents perfectly layer the chaadar with the kambal and make your bed. Playing Antakshari and reading books and running around from one coach to another finding other kids to play hide and seek with. As you grew older, you also began to have favourites. Like the side upper berth. Or aloo-poori-achaar for packed dinners.

Train journeys were a mini vacation in themselves. And I miss them. In-flight entertainment doesn't quite cut it.

So today was a good day. I was on the train after two long years and the ever faithful not-good-enough but paramparaa waali dip-dip chai comforts my soul. I hadn't realised how much I needed this oasis.

Vocab for the uninitiated:

Nani - maternal grandmother

Dadi - paternal grandmother

Raja Beta - expressing adoration - my prince/princess

Ghee - butter, but better

Chaadar - bedsheet

Kambal - blanket

Antakshari - a game - think Atlas but with songs

Parampara - tradition (and also partial reference to Bollywood movie Mohabbatein)

Waali - helping verb

The post after a hiatus.. eventually.

I've realised I do most of my writing on impromptu text messages to close friends. So I've decided to simply post them here, with a little bit of context. Maybe, it gives the three people who read this some words to feel something about.

Him: Trust yourself Sushruti. And have faith in yourself. I know I do. And things will work out.

Me:

Things will work out.

Eventually.

That's where all faith rests.
And on days I wonder what that place must look like.

I wonder if it's a graveyard for broken dreams or a river catching sun-beams with Tennyson writing me poetry on its banks.

I imagine that one day I'll reach it, and it'll be dark and empty, covered in wet moss from all the years of tears, unspent in the hope packaged for this place.

Eventually.

When I'm drowning, I need to see which way to swim to get to the surface. On days, I wonder if it's this place that beams all my stored sunshine and gets me through.

On days I wonder if sunshine is a finite resource.

I wonder if we ever get there. If in the last moments of our existence, we look at the lives we've led and realise that this elusive eventuality was not a phenomenon of the future. That it's the life we've already led. That it's what's already been done. The only thing you can ever truly rely on.

In our final breath, maybe we realise that eventuality is a purse with an undetectable extension charm and we've carried it in our pocket all along.

That's where we've stashed all our hope and we find it, when we need it, without ever knowing if we will run out. That's the thing about extension charms. We never know where they end.

But every now and then, as I tap my pocket, I feel the slight bulge. And I know. That for today, there is enough in my purse to get me through. And tomorrow, hasn't arrived yet.

And for when I run out, maybe I've lived well enough for someone to lend me a little bit of sunshine from their eventualities.

Eventually, we'll all get there.

Of Post Scripts and letters.

(Finally posting a draft from a long time ago)
___

A Post Script is what comes after the letter.

For things you forgot while you were talking about other things but things that nevertheless have to be said and cannot be kept to oneself.

For things that are remembered because everything else still seemed to be missing something essential until a PS was added.

And sometimes, for things too mundane to be said while talking of spring and cherry trees. Like getting groceries or picking up the kids from daycare. For the ending after the happily ever after.

But there are also times when we write long letters just so we may add a Post Script in the end, as a carefully crafted careless afterthought, pretending to not care about it's subject matter, when that in itself is the reason the letter exists in the first place.

I've in fact seen the most important of conversations happen in the PS's of letters, while discussing the weather and tedious monotonies of life in the main text.

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PS: You were looking beautiful yesterday.

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PS: Thank you. And thank you for helping me out. I owe you one :)

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PS: Not a problem at all. :) Though a Thank You does sound better with coffee...

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PS: This Sunday, 5 pm, where we met last?


You see what I mean? The Post Script - helping humans communicate their feelings more effectively since forever. A PS simply is a beautiful thing.

If letters were life experiences, post scripts would be what was sometimes needed to make them complete.

So it is no surprise that many of my letters invariably end with a PS; because I am unable to end them without remembering something more after I've ended them.

Speculations of the I-know-this-is-it-but-I-won't-really-believe-myself kind tell me that this is because on these occasions, I'm too scared to say the things I want to say most.

And also because the post script, by virtue of being a PS, cannot be in the main body of the letter and was probably thought of by an equally forgetful fellow human being, to ease all our letter writing woes.

Post scripts are powerful. They get to make or ruin perfectly crafted words the way sudden showers make or ruin nice Autumn evenings, depending on where you're sitting. And it is this power that makes me spend more time crafting my PS's than I spend in writing the actual letter sometimes.

The next time you're writing someone a letter (and I hope that is soon! God knows we need letter writing to start trending ASAP or hopeless romantics like me are doomed to a life of wistful longing), remember to add the PS. It makes quite the difference :)

So dear PS,

Thank you for completing my letters every now and then. Feels nice to know someone's got your back every time you forget something important in life :)

Love,
S

PS: I love you :P

PPS: I just had to say that. It was begging to be written. Really.

I'm Hindu.

I remember putting my hand into a pot of boiling water for tea
My mother shrieking and getting it out
running it under cold water
getting ice
using frozen dough
toothpaste
She diligently tried everything but
by evening
the skin on the back of my hand was so wrinkled
I could have fooled anyone of my age
if I hadn't had the tiny hands of a four year old.

I learnt early on that you can't stop the wrinkles from appearing when they must.

And when they do, they bring pain.

Physical.

With a sense of losing of the wholesomeness within you,
Inch by inch of skin
Fold by fold of time
and time itself, as it unfolds
skin by skin
healing
makes whole again.

I learnt soon after, that time heals.

My hands are no longer wrinkled.

But in due course of time I'll be there again.

And be healed yet again because,
Souls, they transcend time.

Maybe I'll get seventh time lucky
when the flames are lit
and I am burnt this time.

South Calcutta lanes and sonder.

Sonder:

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

A beautiful definition provided by the forever brilliant Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: 

I recently came across this word because a friend and mentor shared a poem of the same name with me.

And it reminded me of how beautifully the word represented an evening of urgent writing on whatever paper pieces were at my disposal, trying to explain an almost inexplicable experience I had on the streets of beautiful South Calcutta (while the lovely gentleman opposite me at the table patiently let me finish and offered to be first proofreader).

14th November, 2016 @ La maison des délices, South Calcutta.

It was quite extraordinary, the ordinariness of that sight. 

Clad in a dull cotton saree that had been washed often and more, she held the black grill on the stairway window, looking out onto the street, at nothing in particular and yet holding something so potent and piercing in her gaze that the mere sight of her made me stop. 

It was an old two story building on a street corner in the heart of old South Calcutta. The walls mellowed in yellow paint and weathered down by the ravages of a forgetful, or perhaps helpless owner, who it seemed would have had a keen eye for bright colours in the youth of the building when it had last been painted. For the dull municipality yellow of the walls was contrasted by a bright earthy orange column of colour that surrounded the grilled full length windows on the stairway, offering a view of the beyond while keeping the house-secrets to its unyielding inner sanctums. It was as if time itself had stopped for the hands of a skilled painter to capture its essence into that moment. The lady, in all her commonplace wistful dignity, framed on a stairway window amidst the orange of overcast sunsets, looking out at the world and thinking, ruminating on a life that I will never know. A life she lived out within those weathered walls and fiercely laid claim to. A life that stood for all others that I will never know.

It was such an intensely private act of contemplation done with such disregard for its public accessibility that I stopped. And I took out a camera with the intention of capturing what would make for a beautiful frame and then left without clicking anything because I couldn’t come to terms with desecrating that time and moment.

* * *

Happy Diwali! Aao milkar diya jalaayein :)

Here's wishing everyone a brilliant year ahead and hope you had a beautiful Diwali :)

May you all find the courage to let the light in.

For Diwali, I translated one of my favourite Diwali poems into English. Here goes:

The original by Atal Bihari Vajpayee:

आओ फिर से दिया जलाएँ

आओ फिर से दिया जलाएँ
भरी दुपहरी में अंधियारा
सूरज परछाई से हारा
अंतरतम का नेह निचोड़ें-
बुझी हुई बाती सुलगाएँ।
आओ फिर से दिया जलाएँ

हम पड़ाव को समझे मंज़िल
लक्ष्य हुआ आंखों से ओझल
वतर्मान के मोहजाल में-
आने वाला कल न भुलाएँ।
आओ फिर से दिया जलाएँ।

आहुति बाकी यज्ञ अधूरा
अपनों के विघ्नों ने घेरा
अंतिम जय का वज़्र बनाने-
नव दधीचि हड्डियां गलाएँ।
आओ फिर से दिया जलाएँ

-- अटल बिहारी वाजपेयी

Translation in English:

Let's light again, the lamp together.

Let's light the lamp together again.

This darkness at the peak of the afternoon

The sun defeated by shadows

Let us squeeze out, as oil, the darkness within ourselves

And re-ignite the extinguished flame instead.

Let's light the lamp together again.

We confused the milestone for the destination

Our aim having fled our sight

In the materialistic trappings of the present

Let's not forget the tomorrow yet to come.

Let's light the lamp together again.

The sacrifice pending, the yajna incomplete

Surrounded by the obstacles born of our own kin

To remodel the vajra of the final victory

The Dadhichi's of today must melt their bones again.

Let's light the lamp together again.

*Yajna is a Vedic ritual in Hindu tradition which is done as a composition of offerings composed of specific ingredients to a sacred fire with the objective of collective good. 

*Vajra is a thunderbolt or mythical weapon, often touted as the most powerful one (references found in both Hinduism and Buddhism).

*Dadhichi was a rishi (saint) from Hindu mythology who melted his bones to form the material used to make the vajra.

This is the first time I've tried translating a poem. Do let me know what you think :)

HAPPY DIWALI :)

PS: Special thanks to the people that took out time to help me make this better. I am glad to have you in my life <3 font="">

Untitled Ode and Obituary to my generation, part I

We are a puff puff pass generation
Of puff puff pass rebellions

So take a drag on your cigarettes
And smoke out your lungs

Aakhir aag koi dehek rahi hogi andar
Jo itna dhuan hai
Aur agar mehez dhuan hi hai bas
To kabhi maa ke man mein jhaankna
Tumhe wahaan dikhega
Dhuein se aag kaise sulagti hai

We are a puff puff pass generation
Of puff puff pass rebellions

So take another drag of depression,

And anxiety 

And slit your wrists, pass the blade

Cut cut pass.

Making doors on your skin

for your soul to pass through

Quick escapes

Slow deaths

Agar inti jaldi hai jaane ki

To koi asahneey peeda 

peechhe chhode jaa rahe hoge

Unbearable pain 

Hurt hurt pass,

this undying pain, 

unto those you love most.

We are a puff puff pass generation
Of puff puff pass rebellions

Rebellions which are born of old monks and young blood,

Mixing,

Making cocktails offered according to taste.

And you could order harmless fun

And you could order violence.

Aur 'madhushaala', 'madhoshi', sab shabd 

kavitaon mein kitne pyaare lagte hain

Shukr hai lekin

Us ladki ko in kavitaon ko padhna nahin aata, 

Vo ladki jiske pitaji ghar kal nashe mein aaye the

Jiski maa ne apne gham siskiyon mein dubaaye the

Jiski kranti bhi madira se jaagegi, magar aise ki

We are such a generation of puff puff pass ironies,

Cronies,

Stealing time from our own lives,

and I wish we could stop,

but we puff puff pass our time

"Killing time isn't murder but suicide"

But what do we care about quotes, 

they are but dead lines.

We are a puff puff pass generation
Of puff puff pass rebellions.