Foxy Lady - no, really

You know I'm talking about you, Hazel Karkaria. Who else could it possibly be?

Since you insist on giving till it hurts - yes, there's no other way
Since you will nurse for it is what you know how to do,
Since you will give of yourself till there's scant left for you (or me)
Since no Squish or Dio or Brownz will ever go orphaned till there is you,
I doff my hat - my heart - to you.

Every day a little bit more than the sum of a staggering legacy,
You make life worthwhile; hiding behind your squish, even as he once hid behind you.

I hope you'll always love till your heart breaks
And that you'll love again - as fiercely - as before.
Also, that I come back as a puppy or kitten or squirrel in another life; so you will love me more.


Hang in there. You have no choice.
Another Squish will need you soon.

She used to sign off as 'H'.

She used to sign off as 'H'. It was simpler to let that letter, that alphabet, stand in for her; who she was, and who she was every moment becoming. It had none of the burden of her 'real' or 'given' name. Harmony. Talk about the responsibility attendant to a name like that. You have to cultivate, propagate it - sometimes at tremendous odds with what you might really want to do to/with those jackasses you share the road with - live it, goddamnit. Then there's the musical implication. How could a Harmony - any Harmony - not harmonise? And well at that? Bref, she used to, as I said, sign off as 'H'.

She read an awful lot, did our H. She only wrote a little. She heard an awful lot of music, and sang with a band thrice a week for the better part of 13 years. She only composed a little. Her biggest fear was mediocrity. She wielded her erudition like a weapon; prayed it would pass off for genuine intelligence - and, of course, that nobody would discover the difference. She used aforementioned erudition too, as one ought to be able to do with any good weapon, like a shield. To hide behind. Hide what? Well, that wrinkle newly appearing on her face, that little roll of fat around her once tiny waist, the feeling that she was (somehow) an impostor in her chosen field(s), the sinking realisation (or presumption - she was never sure which) that she was more of this world than she liked to believe, that she was heartbreakingly human despite her assertion that hers was an alien creed, and finally, whether this really was all there was. This she cloaked in what most who saw her deemed confidence or arrogance, depending on the generosity of their spirit, or the capacity in which they met her.

She loved, sometimes. She suspected she was a cold-hearted bitch, because she could switch off, retire into her mind which was always her favourite play thing, and contentedly sit out most storms there, snug as a bug in a rug. This was not to say she loved in half-measure, but she was scared by how quickly she was capable of being disenchanted; or worse, indifferent. She was scared of everything and nothing simultaneously. This was largely because, at age 15, she awoke with a start one night. She realised she had been sobbing and gasping for breath in her sleep. H was convinced that this was her last night on earth - alive, anyway - and she was scared of sleeping again for the fact of the yawning neant waiting to claim her for itself. Since then, she seemed to make an uneasy sort of peace with the idea of death. No, she didn't have some sort of revelation that each sorry day needs to be seized or anything as dramatic as that, but she did decide that she had to pack her life with as much seeing and doing as she possibly could. Also, selfishly, she hoped that she wouldn't outlive her parents - the only two people she loved decidedly more than (definitely as much as, at any rate) life [you would too, if you were lucky enough to know them] and the few others around whom the planet that was H revolved or rotated or whatever it is planets are meant to do around their axes.

H would like you to read this post as an obituary. Not because she is deceased, but because she believes we change every second of every day. Not in dramatic ways, perhaps, but change we do. Why, there are some events in her own life which seem so remote, she can't believe they ever transpired. But they did. Is she disowning her past life? No. Is she seeking absolution because the person she is this minute is a different one? Again, no. Why? Because the people that we become are the by-or-end products of the people that we were, and every last thing we've seen, heard, dreamed, touched, felt, abandoned, hurt, carried, loved, shot, eaten, plucked, planted, shorn, revised, bitten, swatted or glued together, bloody well counts. So, this is an obituary for the Hs that were, to make room for those that are, and those that will come.
 
She wrote this post today as a response to something a friend (dear; so dear. and talented - so bloody talented) sent her a few days ago. From him she took the idea of masking autobiography by couching it in the form of an Obit. She got distracted along the way, as has been the story of every H there has been yet, and therefore mused on the form-proper and what it meant to 'be' or not to 'be'. More, to 'become'. Hanged if I know what, though.

And now, back to the thesis. *sigh. I was actually quite enjoying this.      

Miscellanies

Or, what I found when I looked into notebooks which were my only friends during meetings past.

Ostentation is in fashion -

Wear your caste, class, house,

hat

Use your clout; shout out

that you've got it

Loud, so that they know you've arrived.

Who says Partition wasn't tangible?

You can touch it in the hardened

identities and fixed ideas we wear

to-day.

Who (not what) underpins you?

Do I?

Is it your self?

Man, woman, other?

F(r)ag~men~t M

E now.

Perhaps this is what is known as self-centred-ness.

I wonder if

it'd still be cold

in Gujarati.

Translation has pitfalls.

Or, perhaps,

into a pit falls.

She has no sympathy for apathy, does our H.

Go already,

Or, Before that cup of coffee

I wake up in the middle of the day,

And I know I want a cup of coffee.

All around me greens are bright and blues are gay -

Bref; it's rarely ever this right.

Just around the bend

across the road from here,

Is a place that sells instant nirvana.

The colours choke you in a million different ways,

And when you breathe?

You become them.

Instant is a good word.

It comes in a cup

frothy.brown:

The future is dune. The future is camel.

Dishy.

Resistance is clearly a dish

best washed down with

a bottle of Bud;

Mainly because Chinese beers haven't hit our markets yet.

Tibetan settlements serve, so,

the best Chinese food.

As ever, consumption creates and perpetuates the norm.

Consumption, you see, needs no gumption. Ingest. Digest. Eject.

It is the currency;

it is the price

of freedom.

I wonder if His Holiness likes Chili Tofu?

Faculty Meeting 2.yawn~oh.

Or,

The day after World Music Day,

isn't one on which we're going to play:

Stuck in a moment I can't get out of,

In despair - sheer, utter -

all I can do is my weary head lay

on this 'ere desk.

After all, 'tis said that poetry comes out of misery.

I'm about to find out.

One more cup of coffee 'fore I go

You cannot force silence

into a shape

to fill the shoes

of a story-sized hole.

You cannot make it speak in tongues.

You cannot make it speak at all.

Is it vulnerable?

Is silence strong?

Can it hurt her?

Can silence be wrong?

To end in the beginning,

In Bombay, they had told him

to land in white flannel.

He did. The rest is his~story.

In which she stumbles and falls and generally makes an ass of herself. In the nicest possible way.

Elton John got it all wrong, I tell you. 'Sorry' is nowhere near 'the hardest word'. I put to you that 'thank-you' (hyphenated, two technically, but one yet) is. There are some debts you incur by the fact of living that seem near impossible to settle. The ones I owe my flower-power mother and father, for example. Or the ones I owe Hazel and Melody.

Then there are others which defy explanation by the unbearable lightness of (their) being; by insinuating the ones bestowing these goodnesses into my life in ways even I scarce understand. Shiv, Bini, Tridip, Aditi; I mean you, and the world of your making which I will forever cherish and treasure.

How often does one get to meet the most gargantuan intellect of their age? How much less likely yet is it that when aforesaid intellect personified and ossified in the form of one Shiv Visvanathan (who wears his erudition and learning as lightly as if it were woven of that muslin so fine, it got that poor Mughal princess of years gone into all kinds of trouble) breezes into your life, he introduces you to others of his ilk - the inimitable civilising force known in short-hand as Binita Desai, and the Auditor-General of the universe-at-large, Tridip Suhrud? Of course, Space-Oddity-Nut Sarkar, who doesn't even remember if he saw Janis Joplin ("some woman was on stage alright, but I can't be sure it was her") live completes this, my unholy trini - wait. Quartet.

If Shiv's is the elemental beat, setting this bossa groove a-going, Bini plays Brubeck, conducting and leading with her searing sense of aesthetic [to which we all secede, concede, and defer diligently]. Add to this the stand-up bass playing, backbone-providing walking jazz lines of Dr Suhrud, and we have something of a winner on our hands, my increasingly puzzled readers - stay with me, because this metaphor; laboured as it is, is about to bear fruit! (teeheehee) Oddity Sarkar is the sax-playing, melody providing layer that makes this mix pop, sizzle and crackle. They play bizarre time-signatures even I fain understand, these people do, but when you *get* where they're going? *sigh. It sounds as intricate, beautiful and life-affirming as this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc34Uj8wlmE

Can you blame me for being enchantedbedazzledinaweandmorethanalittlebitinlove?

What brought on this slightly illiterate (but very heartfelt) paean to the wonder that is my DA-tribe?

Something that is less bright, light and for those very reasons probably the most important thing I've ever seen them involved with. You see, Shiv, Bini and Tridip, alongside another woman I admire as much as life itself, Teesta Setalvad and her Citizens for Justice and Peace (http://www.cjponline.org/) were the 'brains' behind the Gulberg Society Memorial on the 27th of February. This was to commemorate the massacre which occurred there during the Gujarat riots (and that's putting it very mildly) of 2002.

When I learnt that these people were working with the CJP on this 'Memorial to a Genocide', my first reaction was that I wanted to help; in any way, shape or form that I possibly could. Shiv co-opted me into writing for this issue of Communalism Combat (which saw the most devastatingly poignant of his writings yet, to my mind. These have been beautifully translated into Gujarati by Tridip and Saroop Dhruv). Bini came up with ideas for the other 'installations' at the society, and they were meant to sensitise anyone who showed up - no questions asked about who or why - about all that happened, conditions in euphemistically named rehabilitation-camps to this day, and allow them to engage with Gulberg society; a place which saw loss in senses of the word most of us cannot imagine possible. She came up with the idea of a 'Wailing Wall' along one side of the mosque which stands as quiet witness at the entrance of the society. On it we hung up almost 800 photographs of those dead or missing post-riots. Needless to say, the victims of the Godhra tragedy were equally a part of this space for mourning.

As the victims-survivors-witnesses to these riots started coming in on that day, from all across the riot-affected areas of Gujarat, this wall took on the afterlife of a sacred symbol - testament to lives lost; stories which weren't ordained to narrate themselves through, in the form of lives lived. Clusters of people stood in front of it throughout the day, for hours on end. Someone moved some of the pictures around, so that the members of one family could rest alongside each other at least in this commemoration of absence; someone else prayed in front of the photographs of their relatives. With every passing moment, as the day wore on and one finally sat down and let the enormity of the situation sink in when Shubha Mudgal joined her voice - earthy, organic, as attuned to the loss of those she sang for as any human being could be - to the ones of those asking for cognizance of devastating wrongs done, and justice, before conciliation can become a reality, my heart broke into a million pieces.

I started obsessing over the photograph of a child lost in the Pandherwada massacre. This little guy couldn't have been over three years old, and behind his intense Lennon-inspired dark-glasses, I'm sure he was looking out at (but also beyond) the photographer, with a brazenness that was so endearing, I was shaken to the core.

I was all of 19 when the riots 'happened', and left India a few months after the last of the fires had been put out. I've never really engaged with loss on this scale; I haven't had to. This might also have been because, as I've said in an earlier post, Ahmedabad is bloody conducive to the building around oneself of towers. Of the ivory variety. I didn't know what happened in 2002 any more than what was common knowledge owing to media coverage. It imposed upon my consciousness years later, when 'writing the city' for DNA made me grapple with it in ways I'd dismissed in the past. In allowing me to see, hear, but also touch, feel and smell Gulberg, Teesta, Shiv, Bini and Tridip allowed me - more accurately, forced me - to own up to silence as culpability; to inaction as disaster, and reminded me (as if this ever needed doing) why they fight the good fight every day of their lives.

You, each and every last one of you, are responsible for whoever and whatever I am 'becoming'. I absolve my selves (many. plural. yes. I know what I mean) and future selves from any and all responsibility in this regard.

Shelley says the word love has been too often profaned, so it won't mind my abusing it once more yet.

So love, then. Always.

H.

On Every Street

This post is unique for two reasons: I don't usually write (or read, or twitch, or scratch, or doodle) whilst listening to music. It demands my full attention - if it's music of my own choosing, of course - and any less would be sacrilegious (which, while it oughtn't bother this a-religious [not irreligious; there's a world of difference] bum too much, well, does, because it's music, goddamnit). Today, I'm trying to write as On Every Street (the song, not the album) plays in the background. The second reason is that I'm giving myself only two listenings (10 minutes and 8 seconds) to get this done with. If I don't keep myself amused, who will?

What brought this post on, to get back to the point I never made in the first place, come to think of it (this is like the debate on whether the Rukhmabai case of 1884 was for a 'restitution' of conjugal rights or an 'institution' of them in the first place - hah - who says history doesn't move in mysterious ways?), is this - I think this song has one of the finest build-ups I've ever heard. It ranks way, way up there, alongside Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Take a Pebble, Part 1 of The Wall and possibly Brothers in Arms in terms of the way these numbers draw you in, and when you think you've got them sussed out, gobsmack you into tomorrow with a build-up that actually takes you/them to a plane you wouldn't have imagined possible. The dynamics of Knopfler's playing - and I say this having heard most everything DS has ever done, a lot of his solo stuff, and having seenheard him live - blow me away; in his hands, the guitar becomes more eloquent than, than - Martin Luther King, I tell you! His attack, his tone, the finger-picking style? Of course, the musicians he plays with - bloody brilliant each one -help some; the way they play 'together' is testament to their genius, sure, but also how keenly they feel each rise, swell, drop in the riff at hand, in the movement, in the music of their/his creation.

Ok. I cheated, but only by a minute. I'll end here and post this before I change my mind. More in another piece sometime? Of course, it'd have been smarter to pick the epic Shine On (13 minutes and counting) to exercise (exorcise, even?) this little idea. What can I say? Knopfler hath mee (in keeping with the Keatsian conceit) in thrall.

Jazz is gossip.

Jazz is gossip.

There. As always, I spent it on the title. I’m wondering if I should sully the obvious (insert self-congratulatory slap on the back here) truth of that line by giving it an entire post – surely it would work better as a stand-alone, tightly-condensed little aphoristic gem? (Yes – this is more of that obnoxious self-congratulatory behaviour on display, but cut me some slack – is it a gorgeous formulation or what? I’ve been so pleased with myself ever since I hit upon it, I can’t stop smiling. Widely. Rather stupidly – there. That’s your recompense.)

It came to me when I was driving home one night, listening (as I often do), to that seminal album Time-Out (1959), by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. It features the extraordinary Blue Rondo a la Turk, Kathy’s Waltz, the seminal (and therefore only song most people have heard by these splendid musicians) Take Five, Pick Up Sticks, Three to Get Ready, Strange Meadow Lark and this rather stunning little thing called Everybody’s Jumpin’. It’s this last that got me thinking, and in the fond hope that it might have the same effect on some others, I’m (ever so helpfully) attaching a link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3aqw0RY384

It started out like this. As ever, I was humming the ‘home riff’ or point of departure (and by virtue of being aforementioned departure, also, importantly, point of re-entry into the song proper) when it dawned on me that I was in a curious space; an interstitial one pregnant with possibility, where it felt (in keeping with this metaphor) that something was being born. In my head, since I can only thinkreadwritedreamsee in text, I called it a phrase. Once established, by virtue of all the musicians consenting that this indeed *is* ‘home’, each one started venturing out by way of soloing; there began the game of Chinese Whispers. It became obvious that what informed the soloing was the acknowledgement – sometimes the merest hint of it sufficed – of this starting point, from where it cast further and further afield; the home phrase took on a cultural afterlife all its own, before, inevitably winding back to the source, but only to elaborately take it into another space.

Consider now, reader dearest, how the informal ‘web’ that underpins culture works. You hear something. In repeating it, you add/subtract/explicate/repudiate/play with it, to make for a ‘better story’ (nudge, nudge, wink, wink), and before you know it, it has become something else. Rumour or ‘hearsay’ is thus born. Circulate it – in a perambulator, if you must, for it is an infant yet – and you’re staring at the beginnings of that most monumental of all things – gossip.

Can classical music be equated thus? My head says no, my gut quite the opposite. Perhaps it is a more codified exit-point, but isn’t any form of improvisation essentially, structurally, a deviation from an established norm? To me, it is gossip yet, but perhaps the kind of thing you’d hear in the corridors of power – the Rajya Sabha, the Assembly. It hasn’t the playfulness, the levity, the vivaciousness of office gossip – the valued information exchanged over the coffee dispenser. The knowing look you give the boss you’ve just heard about, as you slide into place to dash off yet another infernal reportarticlelecture (insert output of labour of choice here). No. For that you want some jazz. Of course you do. Everybody’s jumpin’, after all.

Even Cowgirls Get The Blues*

I’ve heard tell that distance can induce psychosis of a sort.

That you can feel bipolarly giddy with excitement one moment;

Decidedly devastated the next.

This really is a tango for one not two;

like a complex arrangement rendered for solo guitar

The other stands no chance

For how do you 'hear'

when a word is merely seen?

Things do not always 'se repondent'; not always can you see

the collapsing of categories

long known,

long held

to correspond.

And this

in a love which speaks different tongues.

Sweet, languorous ecstasy.

Something meant,

Something heard.

Something pierced

Out of turn.

These are the perils of a love

faceless, nameless, sometimes woebegone.

* This title comes from the work of an author I love much, Tom Robbins. Anything else isn't his fault.