Intezaar

I am nervous. Its been 3 long years since I had seen you. Since I held your hands passionately and kissed your lips. Its been 2 years since I had talked to you over the phone or on internet. Its been 1 year since the last of the emails reached my mail box, and the reply to which got lost in oblivion.

I have heard about you, in every friend gathering. I have handled zillions of questions related to you.. quite diplomatically. Without having to say the obvious which I kept hidden like a little secret like so many we had. Those little secrets we always had. I knew you are alright. I knew your life grew out of the path that I had chosen and that, divergence was the fate we had, was pretty clear to me.

I had relinquished the company of known faces. People with unknown names and background gave comfort to me. You know, when you keep on meeting newer people, you don’t have to answer personal questions. I had even confided in those people whom probably I would never meet again, to talk about life, to talk about the pain it throws your way. In many ways those strangers were a man (woman in some cases) with golden heart. Many of them told me the eternal truth of Geeta, that whatever happens is for good. I wasn’t looking for reassurance though. But it was relief for me, to let some oxygen enter the closed ventricle of my heart. Where there was nothing, now there is a bit of blood circulation.

For three years now, slowly but steadily I had to meditate to get my mind back on living. I was depressed for a long time. I was mad at myself. I felt guilty and at the same time tried to reason out my own bail. I remembered all that was said between you and me. I thought of all the close moments once the bulb is switched off in my bedroom. I thought of all the fights that torn us apart. Most of the cases I felt it was my fault. But that was too late for a confession. Or rather, that self acknowledgement was a mere act of reconciliation, something to get things straighter than what they were at that time.

I wanted to feel you by my side by taking deep breaths and the smell wasn’t there anymore. I wrote down numerous mails…then deleted them. I never called as all the previous efforts of talking had failed and turned into a dull exchange of silence.

Now that I am waiting here, at the arrival lobby of this airport, I do not know whether you will glow up seeing me there. Whether you will recognise me here. None told me you are coming. I came on my own. Overhearing someone saying this. You may choose to ignore me. You may even turn away if you happen to see me by chance. I felt a sudden surge of adrenalin rushing through my body. The tea cup I was holding was too hot to be held in control. Hence I threw it out. I looked away, there you were.

And then you smiled at me.

Calcatian’s Don’t Bite……………..2

Since I am such a comment hunter and my reader(s!!!???!!!) have threatened me of not giving comments until and unless I write some good things about Calcutta, here I am and there you go.

Calcutta as was portrayed in my previous topic looked like a city of brainless dumpers (god knows what that means) or in other words a city of modern English educated smarties. Which I am afraid is a too much of generalization of a city which far far greater than any other city of India in colour, in culture and in liveliness. If you want to see Calcutta and its life in true colors, u have to come with me for a ride which I took on last Wednesday.

I was supposed to go to a bank at Girish Park. When I finished my work, it was 1pm and I still had quite sometime at hand. I chose to roam around and capture some of the city moments in my camera.

1. I traveled to Park Street. I went to the place where thousands of people came together to do a civilized protest against the mysterious death of Rizwanur Rahaman. I sat on the pavement, there was nothing worth capturing there at that point. There was nothing which I could take a snap of and show people that see this is Calcutta and this is how the people of Calcutta are. That is a pity. But sitting there at the pavement, I could feel the energy, the sentiment and the same sympathy that those people had who came to light a candle for a guy who is from a different religion, whose life probably doesn’t have similarity to any of ours life, who was born anonymous and death made him famous. I have little to do with Rizwanur’s death and nor do I know what all went in between the husband and wife’s families. I was simply amazed at the response people gave and the way they accepted a muslim fellow’s marriage to a rich hindu girl. I am sure if you were in somewhere south or somewhere west of India, this would not happen. Bravo Kolkata.

2. The next stop was at Victoria memorial. I still remember the day when my parents brought me to this architectural wonder. I looked at it with awe. This time was no exception. I looked at the memorial, and was lost in memory until something broke my spell. A guy, in yellow t-shirts and jeans was saying to a girl, “bolo amar bou hobe?” [“Tell me,will you be my wife?”]. and quite amazingly the girl responded with a soft and quite Hollywood style kiss on the guy’s lips. A sweet simplicity which is the bloodline of this city touched me and that sweet sound of the kiss kept on ringing in my head and heart for the rest of the day. People suddenly have grown up here.

3. The last part was the most tiring of my journey. I was returning home and I had to catch a local train from Dumdum junction to the suburban area where I live. It was a train fully crowded. And as usual there were hastles at every station. People had to struggle with great vengeance. In Agarpara stop, I noticed an old man (I guess his age would be somewhere near 75) running after the train and jumping on to it with an amazing dexterousness. Kolkata lives at the age of 75 too. It struggles to live on, and it succeeds. Then there was this boul(a kind of singer from the Vaishnava Sect) who started singing a song in the tune of a rabindrasangeet in that jampacked train. Then there was this blind kid, who had a speaker on his back, a harmonium hanging from his shoulders and singing, “ek bar bidai de ma ghure asi” and suddenly I was all emotional. May be it owes a lot to the fact that I have been staying abroad or that I love my mother tongue dearly but still I would give credit to the city which stays, at this age of superfast globalization, a virgin when it comes to its people and their unscathed lifestyle. These trains are the bloodlines of Calcutta, and they truly portray the life of it.

Don’t know whether I have blabbered a lot in this post or I have talked nonsense too much. May be I’m a sentimental fool to think in these lines but these were the moments which touched me quite a lot and I am just being true to myself.

Taking life as it goes…

It’s not an easy job. It’s not an easy job to take life as it goes, to take it easy. It creeps in silence; it advances its army of darkness in your mind. And slowly it engulfs your senses. The expectations fall apart, and suddenly the whole world becomes black and white loosing all its animated colors.

When I grew up, I grew up reading Sarat Chandra, Tagore’s romantic works. My father gave me a book on English poetry’s romantic age. That was an amazing book with small annotations in my father’s unintelligible handwriting on the margin. I read those poems with the eyes of Columbus looking at the new world. The attraction towards the fairer sex became known to me.

I wanted to fall in love like every other adolescent of my age. Romanticism became a way of life for me. I still remember those lively discussions with my mates about the definition of love and how to find them. I thought I knew it, and it’s only a matter of time to find it. I wanted to create something like those poems and I knew it by heart that it’s possible only if you fall, and fall hard in love.

There were these numerous diaries that my dad used to get from different well wishers, and I loved those. Those became the first breeding ground for my poems. I spent sleepless nights in the thoughts of an unknown lady who will make my life more charming, more delightful. Love was all over me and unlike kids of today I didn’t know something so powerful is not something of a child’s play.

All these things at a point became obsession for me. I fell in love almost everyday with the girl sitting next to me, with the girl whom I talked to for one minute to ask a question in my biology tuition, with the girl who on an ashtami was wearing that beautiful sari and that hypnotizing perfume.

And quietly, deep inside my heart I knew I have never known love. I wondered around the city on my bicycle only to see my school mates roaming around with good looking girls on their way back from tuition. I saw a lot of my seniors in school settling down with the girl of they loved. I envied them, as the grass is always greener on the other side.

Later I thought one need not look for love. It is something that should look for you. And someone told me that whatever happens to you is for good. Although the latter one is a cliché and everyone knows about it, at this point I started believing it as it came out of a girl and she let me know this after turning down the first offer I could ever frame up or rather to say could accumulate enough courage to place.

I grew up with all these. Not having love in life was something that demoralized me. I always wanted to have someone to talk to. Someone to share my heart’s content with. With all due respect to my mom, she could not possibly be the one to share a growing up kid’s all the thoughts. She could not become the one. My continuous hunt went on.

When I met her, I was 24. Not really a kid anymore. Living away from my parents had already given me a bit of maturity. All 18 years in a boy’s school had taken its toll and I was never smart enough to talk to girls till this point. Now things were changing. I was no longer desperate and I was no longer single and looking. Rather I was only single.

We had some previous connections to get us introduced. Both of us were aliens in a new city. We didn’t know what to do and how to live out our life in there. We spent time together. Weekends came and passed; days became long and then short again. Our proximity became unmatched to any past time. Suddenly one day I, for the second time in my life, fell again. I asked the question and straight came the answer “NO”.

But this time there was a separate tinge in the answer, a little pickle like taste, a bit of spice and that no remained in my life till date. How sweetly one can say a yes in disguise of a NO! Life changed for me. For the first time I was a proud boyfriend of a nice girl. Things are never this straight in life. Like the countless waves in marina beach, events in life come and go and the only thing they leave behind is the wet sand. Our relation too became sour, sourer and sourest, when we decided to part. Parting was not an easy job at least not for me. She seemed to take it quite easily. I could never learn the trick. Probably the born romantic in me didn’t let me learn it. I broke. I even got determined to win her back. I swore that she will never be happy without me. I cursed the distance between us, I cursed my destiny. But as an end result, I was back to square one, this time more devastated than ever. I don’t know how these events take place. Are there any rules of statistics, probability which govern them? Are there any laws of natural phenomena which can rationalize why people behave as irrationally as I did? As I said in the beginning, it’s never easy to take life as it goes, and it’s harder to take life easy. Loves labor was lost, and so am I.

[A fictitious diary of a broken mind]

Dadu

I have always been influenced by elders. Elders have always blinded me with their achievements, their struggle for existence and success in it, and their advices. Now that may not be much of a thing what a “Kool” dude would have wanted to do. But I did.

I will talk about my grand parents today… well don’t have that much time to talk about all of them but let me talk about at least one of them here.

He is my mother’s father- Rabindra Nath Halder. He was the one who probably had the biggest influence on me. From my childhood I have heard people saying this is the guy who fits in perfectly in his grand father’s shoes. Well truly I wish I could.

He was a great personality. I have never managed to see him young, quite obviously as he is my grand dad. But I can imagine his youthful glory days. He was tall and stout. His eyes were intelligent and expressive. And he had a memory which I have never seen in anyone else.

When I look back into my life, I try to recollect my earliest encounters with his wit, intelligence and thoughts, I go back to a day of summer when I came to Kolkata to spend sometime at our always so beloved didabari (although the house was owned by Dadu, as we called him, it was named after our much loved dida, grandmother).

Dadu used to call me and start with 4 liners of a poem. Most of them I have never read nor have I heard anywhere. And in some cases lines of poems which I should be knowing but forgot because of my usual lack of concentration, and after reciting those lines, Dadu used to ask me tell me dear, who has written these famous lines?

I, as should be the case, lost the duel of intellect most of the time. I was no match to his memory. But those losses those questions and answers those battles of intellect made me determined next time I will not forget this. And I will prepare more. I wonder at the age of 70 how he remembered all those poems which he last read probably during his college days. And mind it, later on when I have seen his health breaking down, when I have seen his bent structure, when seeing him I have been afraid and thought about my own future, still he was spot on with his poems and those 4 liners.

Sometimes I wanted to run away, and play with my cousins. Sometimes I didn’t want to talk to Dadu about literature and I found some ways to avoid him. Just what the youth does…I guess. But now I feel guilty that by doing so, so many enlightening sessions I have lost. So many inspirations never reached me. Probably I would have been a different person had I been a bit more enthusiastic.

Dadu apart from all his literary abilities was a man of great abilities also. He was a civil servant, working as a magistrate for Govt of West Bengal. He was a proud Govt Official and wanted me to be one. He had always wanted me to go the same route and even higher. When I resisted saying that there is nothing but corruption in govt officials he never believed me. He talked about high ideals and people like Mahatma and Bidhan Chandra Roy.

When I started going to college which was quite near to Kolkata, I started to look at Dadu from a bit different angle. I wanted to analyse him. I wanted to know him as a distant person would have known him.

But I never really could actually. Whenever I looked at him, my respectful eyes and my love for him never let me look at him like a distant person. I was close to Dadu, much closer than his own son could ever get, and much closer than anyone else I got to know.

I used to come for every weekend to Dida bari. Our childhood fantasyland had already lost its charm immensely by that time. I will tell that story some other time. But those weekends was a sense of responsibility that grew inside me. Those two old people who despite their difficulties of survival (as they were living on their own at the age of 84 and 74 respectively my Dadu and dida) expected me to come home every weekend.

Every time my train got delayed, Dadu would stand on the nook of the road, expecting me on one of the numerous autos that passed by. I would take Dadu on those Saturdays to Bank when he needed to pick up his pension. A meagre amount for a magistrate though. And he was growing old, his hand used to shake quite a lot while signing.

One day the bank manager denied him his pension as his sign was not matching. What an irony. A life long devotee of honesty, a brilliant scholar, an honest govt official, a judicial magistrate is begging for a peanut amount (3000 rs)!!! The bank manager confidently asked me to prove that he is RN Halder who holds this pension account.

I fortunately by that time had come out of my small time naivety. I called my uncle and (Dadu’s son) who was a big manager of the same bank and only then the matter got resolved. And when it did, I told the manager, this is what happens to honest people in India. Why bother being one?

Dadu was in pain. He was humiliated, trembling. And I was in pain too.


My Dadu left me left all of us 3 months ago. On his bed while asleep. He faced much pain during his last few days. But his death was peaceful. I, who claimed to be the closest one to him, was sitting in UK in a restaurant having a glass of wine. I have never felt guiltier of my existence since then.


I am crying now. But surely he didn’t want me to. When I talked to him last over a phone and he was on his deathbed, Dadu just had one wish that time. He wanted to see me. Which I could not. I am crying now and I can hear his rhythmic voice chanting lines from Rabi Thakur and then sudden question “bolo to Ankan, er porer line ta ki?”

Indipendence Day

Independence day this year was different. Standing on British soil, we a bunch of 70 odd Indians got together in a meeting room of our office. We shared our views about freedom. We had a quiz about independence and India. And finally we stood together to sing our national anthem. I closed my eyes and started singing aloud to feel all around me different accents(Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi,Bengali and all) singing along in the same tune and in harmony.

I discovered a new Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka this independence day. I discovered India. I had goose bumps and I felt, suddenly, proud to be Indian.

Jai Hind.

Some senti talks....

Slowly a feeling of indifference is growing in me. And I am not enjoying it. I know that i have a responsibility towards my family, towards my country and to myself by fulfilling the other wishes. But slowly and steadily something deep inside me tells me, "what the heck".

May be I am tired and may be I am stressed. Does it happen to you all? At one point of time you just want to leave all that you have and be free. Alone with yourself.

Long back I wanted to become an ideal son. I knew my parents want me to be the first boy in the class. I fought for it. I tried and studied hard. Sometimes I succeeded and sometimes I could not. But then a sense of who the hell cares came into me. I slowed down. I forgot my targets and i wanted to enjoy. Started reading all those wonderful novels which were there in my bookshelf during study hours. Started Sharat Chandra when i was in class V. and gradually my marks graduated downwards. It’s funny how I reacted to it though. In the year 1991, I got admitted in to Siliguri Boys High School. It was a huge school with a huge bunch of kids accumulating in the campus from all over the city. It was the best school for the middle class Bengali speaking people. Although everyone actually agreed that the study standards are really low in that school but the results of higher secondary and secondary are really good. Also the class I belonged to, having one’s kid reading in Siliguri Boys was a status symbol at that time. My parents wanted me to read there too. As my elder sis was already in Siliguri girls the onus was on me to “go get it Boy!!”

I tried hard as usual. And I was in.

So there I was with 300 other kids of the town there sitting in a filthy room with a tin roof, without any ceiling fan sweating like hell. I realized life in here is not gonna be easy. I prepared myself for the intellectual battle that awaited there. Then came the first exam. And the result also followed. I was eighth among the 300 and obviously it was a bad result. I scored 50% marks in Bengali which is below my standards. Now I never knew who actually set those standards for me and neither do I wanted to know but I knew that was awfully wrong to get so low marks. My father went to the school asked for a review or a scrutiny or anything for that matter. Finally it was revealed that I actually scored much more than those meager marks. And I finished second. I stopped crying(all these times I was crying because I could not make the mark I could not make my parents happy).

I can tell you that’s called Bengali middle class life story. That’s how all of us belonging to this typical class grow up. Half in fear of not making others wishes come true, half in fear of not finding others wishes same as our own wishes.

The followed a frenzied saga of high and lows. One exam I reached top the next one I was down to the ground. Probably the exam I would reach the top (not quite the top though I never became first in that school) the effort I would put in for that would do a negative effect on me and the next one would pull me down drastically. My mom found out this trend very soon. She became relaxed in a way. She used to tell me this time results are going to be bad just don’t run away from school I am not gonna hurt you when you come back. Things will be fine.

They are great people - my parents. They always wanted me to do great. I was a kind of apple of their eyes to sudden stardom. A fame that is not-so-easily touchable by ordinary people like they were. But they never pushed me. They never gave up on me although I could never really fulfil their hopes of becoming first boy of the class.

I suffered miserably in secondary. I was down with the result. I didn’t cry as I was a grown up by that time. But my mom understood what was going on in me. One summer afternoon when I was standing on our terrace and looking blindly at the sunny and abandoned streets of Siliguri she came and told me,”good that you didn’t do well this time may be the next time you would..remember the rule of alternate success!!” I started laughing and that was one moment in my life when I understood what role parents play in your life in your success.

I did fairly well in my HS. My name came into the front page of the local newspaper. And I called my mom with the news from a telephone booth that although this time also I could not fulfill their dream and could not become first in the school, still my result was fairly well and I am the 8th in the district.

She was crying. All she wanted is this bit. A fame, a glory for her son. When in her all “have not” life she can really forget all the poverty and all the mediocrity that scathe our lives. We have come one step further. We are no longer ordinary.

I really never did well after that. Never could be anyone worth a mention anywhere. And my mom since then has been deprived of that heavenly smile that I cherished for so many years that came after that.

Now that I wanted to write about something else and have come to something else I have suddenly realized that after all I am not so much indifferent to everything. Let my love forget me, let my life forget me. There are still two people on another side of the earth who still cares and waits in silence for the days of glory for me. They are my ma and baba.