MANY YEARS FROM NOW, WHEN I'LL TIRE N GROW OLD......I LL TELL U A STORY U'LL REMEMBER ME BY....................................

GUWAHATI: NOSTALGIA AND THE CITY

I am an Assamese, and when I write about Assam, being born & bred in Guwahati, I cannot write without having Guwahati in my heart. Guwahati is the city I was born into. Guwahati is the city that my mum & dad choose to build a house and called it their home. There are so many cherished moments related to this city that it is hard to put my finger on any one such memory and say that this is what defines Guwahati for me. Guwahati for me is the collective soul of that varied populace that inhabit its land...........it is the big-nosed city bus that I used to travel on as a twelve year old child, it is that obsession with maas-bhaat (fish-rice) and tamul-paan (betel nut and its leaves) that are laid out on a xorai (an offering tray made of bell/brass with a stand in the bottom) whenever a visitor comes knocking at our door. The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk talked about the huzun (Turkish for melancholy) of his city when he wrote about Istanbul, a city dear to him. If I have to use the same word, then I would say that Guwahati’s huzun lies in the memories of buddhi aair saadhu (grandmother’s stories) that I read as a child. It lies in the acres upon acres of fertile land that lay on both sides of the narrow road, land which is now slowly but surely being turned into residential complexes, malls. It lies in the spirit of bihu and the way it is celebrated throughout the city. It lies in the aura of the neighboring teashops where a good morning chat begins with those famous lines ‘kela ki khobor bey tumar?’ (Hey, how are you?) Off late, a new type of huzun has also crept in. It is in the emptiness of many an Assamese home, with their children gone to study further in Delhi, Bangalore or Pune.

Now, if I close my eyes and think of Guwahati, images rush to my mind...........images of that kilometer-long train journey over the Saraighat bridge with the river Brahmaputra on both sides; memories of that steep uphill walk to the Kamakhya mandir (temple); beggars lying half-naked on pavements outside the Ugrotora mandir; that resplendent display of muga-eri (traditional silk dresses) worn by beautiful Assamese ladies on the eve of bihu (the agricultural festival of Assam); that narrow stretch of road between Chandmari and Guwahati-Club that always seems to be bustling with slow-moving traffic, that far-away removed world of the University campus, a world within a world and acres upon acres of its undeveloped land.

There is an interesting nugget, regarding the origins of serving paan-tamul as a symbol of respect to guests, which I came across while surfing the net one day. The story goes something like this..............Once upon a time; there were two friends, one very rich and the other equally poor. Every day, the poor friend would go to his rich friend’s house for dinner. One day, the poor friend decided to invite the rich guy to his home for dinner and told his wife to prepare something special for the occasion. But there was no foodgrains to cook in the house. So she tried knocking on the neighbor’s doors but they refused to help her. Out of sheer helplessness, she killed herself rather than face the ignominy of having her husband face humiliation in front of his rich friend. The husband, coming back from the fields, saw his dead wife lying on the floor and was filled with remorse. He recalled the argument that they had when his wife told him that they have nothing to eat, He remembered all those moments in the past when he had mistreated his wife, told her lies so he could go to his friend’s place for drinking. In a moment of anguish, he too killed himself and lay down near his wife. The friend, when he came knocking, saw the two corpses strewn on the floor. He thought about his dear friend and his wife, the happy family they were, and the waste of life that now lay before his eyes, something for which he held himself responsible. Feeling guilty, he too committed suicide. Seeing all these unfold before his eyes, God finally came to the house. He felt bad for all of them and transformed their souls into paan, tamul & chun (limestone). The wife, he transformed into chun, the husband paan and his friend into tamul. This way, he united the souls of the husband-wife into one (as we usually consume paan with chun on it). From then on, it is said, that this tradition of offering paan-tamul (with chun) to guests as a symbol of respect started.

Guwahati holds a special place of being, an identity for people from all walks of life and ages. As a small child, my Guwahati was confined to my home, that bus-ride from my home to school and back, my neighbours’ kids, my relatives’ houses and the open ground beside our house, where I used to play cricket as a kid. As I grew up in size, so did my idea of Guwahati. That road between my home and school extended to all the nooks & corners of the city that my exploring feet egged me on; the company of the neighbor’s kids gave way to new friends, acquaintances and my idea of an evening-out moved from a walk to my relative’s houses to the cramped quarters at my friend’s place. Times were changing and so was I. But throughout this cycle of change, Guwahati always remained loyal to me. When I was a toddler, it was that stable ground that I learned to walk on; when I was a bumbling teenager of seventeen, it became that seedy cinema-hall and the neighboring paanwalla that helped me escape from the demands and disappointments of my parents and school; and finally now, when I am a fully-grown male of the employable sort, it has become that distant abode far away from all the din & noise of metropolitan existence, a place that I run away to atleast once in a year.

A special mention has to be made of the slang ‘kela’. It is a way to address one of your peers, something with which you start a sentence or end it. Then, depending on contextual usage, it can be flavored to mean a lot of things..........it can be the happiness that you feel when you meet with a long-lost friend of yours, it can be the pent up frustration that one might feel. At times, it can also mean that, for want of something better to say, you just mumble it out. Like just the other day, I was sitting with one of my friends in my room, getting bored with nothing better to do. Moments before, we had exhausted ourselves with a heavy dose of video games, some of which had ended in arguments. There, slumped on the bedroom sofa, that excitement and its aftermath gave rise to an intense feeling of boredom. Out of desperation, I muttered ‘kela’ three times in as many minutes! The slang ‘kela’ by dint of its repeated and favored use, has succeeded in serving a higher purpose. It has given a sense of identity and belongingness to the Assamese youth among his own peer group. It has also served as a beautiful form of self-expression that goes beyond words, emotions that cannot be conveyed in alphabets.

I, like my Dad, usually have a benign tolerance to things when they change. I was silent when the Gauhati that I grew up in became Guwahati. I also had a tolerant smile on my lips when globalization came and replaced that cup of tea my mother makes with a machine-made cup of espresso coffee. But that day when those eighteen serial blasts shook every nook and corner of Guwahati, I could take it no more. I wept for Guwahati, I wept for the trees in my backyard that seemed soiled from the dust of that blast, I wept for the Guwahati of my childhood innocence that will never be the same again. I wept for the victims who lost their lives and their dear ones for whom life stopped in that instant, if only to be mended in a half-hearted struggle for survival the next day and the days that followed. I wept but was anyone listening? ‘Guwahati will move on.’ Said one of our honorable ministers moments after the blast. True, the city does tend to move on. But that ‘moving on’ has more to do with the apathy of the general public who find it convenient to turn a blind eye to disasters if they happen outside their home. It has also to do with an inherent sense of helplessness that decades of unrest has dealt on the city. So many words have been spoken about our glorious past, so many names of brave martyrs have been counted..........it is time we look into the future and step forward.

Guwahati, with its river Brahmaputra and its many rivulets; the city, with its history of folklore, the inherent craftsmanship of its people since time immemorial; its image tarnished in many a battles fought over the centuries...............such is the soul of the city I was born into. Even now, as I put my pen down away from the paper, I can still hear the distant beats of the Nagara naam (a form of prayer involving loud sounds to drive away spirits) being played out in some remote village not too far away from Guwahati, the dhol (drums) beating in rhythm to the rising tempo of the Taal.

Guwahati is the city I was born in............and someday many years later, when I am old and dying, Guwahati is the piece of land that I would love to sleep forever on.

Gentle Musings

At times, I would get this urge to write something. In the middle of the day or during the night when I lay awake, this urge would hit me. Ideas and thoughts would then float through my mind, and I would long to capture them in prose, afraid that if I let go; they will be lost forever. In these moments, I would feel that my mind is churning out beautiful though unrelated streams of consciousness, which I somehow have to weave together into a coherent whole. But here a paradox would cloud my mind. For, if I have to give my thoughts a free rein, my mind would run here and there; and those transient feelings, for want of a proper direction, would turn into a half-completed mess. But if I restrict myself to a single thought, wouldn’t that be self-defeating in its own way, for then I would be cheating on my own spontaneity and originality (or the lack of it). This paradox stems from the fact that I lack patience and discipline to hold onto a single line of thought for long. Often, when I try to connect to that inner voice, I would find too many responses coming back. Suppose one day I am reading a travel book and the way a particular place is described strikes me, I would then want to pen a travelogue of my own. But even before my mind can give shape to that thought, my heart will lose interest midway and fly away somewhere else. And that cycle will repeat. I have often debated with myself about the need to feel strongly about a subject long enough to give it shape, but more often than not, my patience has worn out. It is at these moments that I feel I cannot be a writer of any significance. I wonder if all the great writers, when they began as novices, felt like this. And hence, I have decided to name this article ‘GENTLE MUSINGS’ for they are nothing more but some jumbled lines of consciousness that I have collated somehow from that confusing abyss called my mind.

The breakout area* in my ninth-floor office has a large glass pane that looks out onto a tiny canal of liquid industrial waste. A pipe runs through the length of the nearby road, which then empties itself into the canal. Early in the morning when the dawn is yet to break, if I happen to be in office, I would sometimes come to the breakout area and gaze outside. With coffee in one hand, as I see the early morning waste fill up the canal, I would imagine it to be a river with a dam on it, which has just been opened. Then, far away on the distant horizon as I see the sun making its slow ascent against the morning sky, a lonely bird, cutting across the face of the still dim sun, would catch my eyes. Sometimes I would catch my own reflection in the glass and the image would feel just like a rainbow against the backdrop. The insect-trail made by the early morning joggers would complete the picture and I would long to capture the moment in words or pixels. Sometimes when I am sitting in the canteen and one of my colleagues is describing one of his recent escapades; I would look out the window and get lost.

Now, when I think of my graduation days, the picture that comes to mind leaves me with a sense of longing. Perhaps this is the same feeling of huzun (Turkish for ‘melancholy’) that Orhan Pamuk meant when he was talking about Istanbul, the city of his birth and the home of his imagination. I still remember those late-night bike rides at full steam, getting up late and roaming the streets without any particular sense of direction. Back then, Shakespeare and Byron existed only in literature books and it was booze and fags that gave a perspective to our thoughts. If college and books took our daytime then it was partying and late night discussions that consumed our nights. Even now, as I am writing this down, I can still see the long lazy nights when we had huddled up together on the bed discussing topics ranging from politics to the sexual revolution. Sometimes I just lie on my bed and wonder. I wonder at all those moments, which have passed me by. All those moments which will never come back again no matter what I do and where I go from now. Its amazing how time just flies when you are not listening to its hands ticking...........................I mean its like staring down a wall-clock...........tick... tick...tick..............seems like an eternity, and then you blink and before you know, all these years just pass. Looking back now, those memories seem from a world far separated from my own..........these glimpses of my childhood which are now captured in photos, albums and that tiny little place in my mind. Sometimes, I just close my eyes and go back in time and I can still smell the rice that my mother once fed me, I can still remember the first time I fell in love and had my heart broken. I can still see all those carefree years of my childhood, running around tables, chairs...getting scolded by uncles, aunties,.....making sorry faces and then forgetting all about it and going out to play. Why can’t life be like that always? Why can’t we capture all these memories in a big photograph........get all our loved ones in it and stay there in that moment forever......no aging, no dying, nothing..............

Often, when I am in one of those depressing moods, I would try to think of the things that make me happy............ I like listening to the soft snoring sound made by my girlfriend when she falls asleep on the other end of the phone. I like the early morning dew sitting on leaves, windowpane of my room. I like walking the streets late at night with my friends when the silence is pin-drop and the only sound you hear is the occasional dog howling from somewhere nearby. I like traveling overnight in a tourist bus to an unknown destination. Then, very early in the morning when the bus stops near a roadside dhaba, I would get down to relieve myself in the nearby fields. Later, sitting on the wooden-bench of a nearby tea stall, I like sipping hot boiling tea with cigarette in hand. I like watching people gesturing to each other from a distance and the animated disco that they make. I like sitting idly with my friends on a hot Saturday afternoon and complain about ‘all the exciting things we could have done today rather than just sit here’. Sometimes, late at night, when sleep fails me, I like crawling up to my mother’s side of the bed and whispering in her ear, “Are you sleeping, Ma?” if only to wake her up.

Sometimes, after a few days of stay at my relatives or friends, I have not failed to notice that the place has slowly turned into a mess, coincidentally from the time that I set foot on their humble abode. As that very someone has gone about pretending polite acceptance of this fate, I have not failed to realize my own doing in it. I am not trying to ‘rub it in’ in the hope that ‘that someone’ will be reading this one day and see the well-meaning person that I am. But, yes I am trying to gently make him or her realize that I am like that only and that nobody is perfect, so basically it’s ok if I come to your house and mess up the furniture a bit!

I have often found myself to be bored in office meetings and year-end appraisal sessions. There sitting around an imposing table, as my boss prepared to go on with his well-rehearsed speech, I have often wondered ‘what’s the use in all these?’ Its not that I have not tried to fit into the role that I am in or do justice to the responsibilities that I carry. I have got my share of above-average and average ratings, which, I think, validates my belief that I have succeeded in playing the part in atleast bits and parts. For its not that I have any misgivings about the concept of work and its importance in human existence. Its just that the idea of office that has come to be seems so constrained, as if it survives only to seep your energy and turn you into a dull nine-to-five machine. I have problems with the officious-looking sofa in the reception-area, I have problems with the hot-looking receptionist who greets everyone with a practiced smile and forgets all about him the moment he passes by. I don’t like the spic-n-span look of the floor; I don’t like the busy-bodies that employees almost always try to cut when they are walking down its carpet. I don’t like the entry and exit time-logs that you are expected to follow once inside the office.

Someone once asked me what I plan to do of my future and I had answered him with all the enthusiasm I could muster. I had told him all the usual things he wanted to hear, not because I wanted to fool him or something but because, like everyone else, I too had dreams of making big bucks. And big bucks you only make if you are good at something and that something, in a wannabe-MBA’s case like me, had to be business. As a growing adolescent, I had this image of myself as a high-flying executive who travels from city-to-city attending client meets. God knows I had wanted to believe this image, if only for my own sake. As a child, whenever I topped a history exam or got the highest marks in some other subject, I had this vision of all the great things that I’ll grow up to be. But then they never came true. I am not too sure about my long-term goals anymore but one of the things that I plan to do (in the not-so-distant future) is to write a travelogue on a beautiful place that I might visit someday. My travelogue would start standing on the platform from where I will catch the train. It would then go on to describe the train-journey, the different people that I meet in that one single day.........I would sleep the entire day (preferring not to socialize too much) and at night, when all the lights are off and everywhere its quiet, I would gaze out the window of my compartment. The train will be traveling through dark countryside with fields of paddy or rice on both sides. Then, as my eye would catch a faint light coming from a distant house somewhere, I would sigh with contentment. Getting down on my destination station the next day, I would then hail a cab to the nearest hotel. By the time, I get to the hotel it will be quite late so I will order dinner in my room and retire to bed. The next day, I would bring out the tourist-map from my bag and get onto a bus to explore the city. During all these, I would keep a diary on which I would scribble notes of places and things I see. Returning home, I would then want to capture those moments in my notebook and my travelogue would be born!.........