Travelblog: Day one - Out of Middle Earth

This journey would be bittersweet. Times change. People change. Cities change. Going back to a place where there are memories that have shaped you, changed you and made what you're today ain't easy. I must say I'm looking forward to this journey with a hint of trepidation and a flutter of anticipation. So here's to you Londontown. Here I come. 

The flight attendant was very bubbly. She had the sharp features a la Audrey Hepburn with the height to match and the smile that accompanied was infectious. In front of me sat a elderly lady - severely hearing impaired with a hearing aid blinking incessantly with its green light - and a young man. They were using sign language as they conversed and when she was serving hot drinks, the girl signed to them totally wrong: she signed tea and her lips said coffee and vice versa. The woman laughed in the typical throaty way a vocally challenged person laughs and the girl embarrassed revealed that recently she’d gone to this class to learn sign language. Obviously she needs more practice!!

The plane landed in Auckland; a perfect landing. I wish I could cheer the pilot but I understand these days the autopilot does it. So for the next 24 hours, I'll be holed up in a belly of a metal beast with totally at the mercy of complex machines and equally complex people. 

Ahh! The joys of flying anywhere from middle earth.

The Scary Way to Grow Up

In the summer vacation of ‘78, I was still quite a few years shy of the official age to watch ‘adult’ ( translation - grownup)  movies in the movie theatres. But that didn’t stop me from pleading, cajoling and finally bullying and blackmailing my brother  to let me go and watch The Exorcist with him. Himself and two of my girl-cousins were planning to watch this movie, which was released in India after a long delay of four and a half years and nothing, absolutely nothing, would’ve stopped me from seeing this movie with the reputation of being the scariest movie of all time.

At that time in the seventies, we had just come out of the Emergency rule by Indira Gandhi and the strict censorship of the period was still in vogue. It was quite usual for the current crop of Hollywood blockbusters to reach our shores a few years after been released in the west and a movie like The Exorcist, I understand, languished in the Indian Censorship Board’s table for a long time. The moral police during the Emergency Raj couldn’t make up their minds whether the movie was too scary or too blasphemic and its only when the Congress party and Indira Gandhi lost the General election, the new regimes ‘openness’ allowed the film to be released albeit with a sizeable cut including a scene involving a cross, which even by todays standard, is shocking.

I had known all about the movie from whatever information you’d get in those days from newspapers and magazines. Swapan Mullick, the film reviewer from The Statesman had said that the movie lives up to its hype and even with the cuts of vital scenes, the shock effect is sizeable. There were some reports of people leaving the theatre early in Kolkata but there was no confirmed reports of people fainting, unlike the reports from the west. A close friend of my brother who’d seen the movie, told us that it was really really scary and self confessed that he’s scared to got to the loo at night by himself and asked his little brother to stand guard.

My father bought the ticket for us – either he didn’t know much of the movie or he thought that the scare would be good for us. I remember my mother telling my brother, your brother is underage if the staff doesn't let him in, you need to come out with him too and forget about the movie. New Empire, where the movie ran, in those days still clung to the great British traditions of eligibility for admissions and we remembered a story when another of our cousins were ejected out of Dr Zhivago by David Lean because she didn't look old enough to be sixteen, though she truly was. And that was nowhere as adult as The Exorcist.

Both my cousins wore saris and girls when they wear the right kind of makeup looked distinctly older. My transformation was trickier. Though I was taller for my age, my face looked pre-pubertal, though there was some hair follicles desperately making an appearance above my upper lip, but nobody in their right mind would mistakenly call that a moustache.  So out came my cousin’s eye- brow pencil and the ‘mo’ looked a bit more substantive. As for the rest of the adult look I pinched my mother’s reading glasses which I realised had to be kept on at all times and I’d be watching the movie, most likely, over the frame of the glasses.

At the door my brother gave the usher the pink tickets with the illegible seat numbers and the middle aged man had one look at me and asked , Is he old enough?

Yes he is, said my brother in sheer panic and snatched the tickets from him and literally shoved me inside the movie theatre.  After we found our seats my brother hissed to me to stay down; I sunk low into the soft seats to avoid detection till the lights dimmed and the advertisement's started. Even then, I’d will myself to blend into the corduroy seats every time a man with a flashlight walked past.

To this day I don’t know what was more terryfying that day –  the thought of being evicted by an usher with a flashlight in the darkened theatre for being underage or the mastery of William Friedkin’s horror tale. What I do know now is that, in a way on that summer day,  I crossed a line, stepped over a border and entered the realm of grown up life.

The Widow

 The Sardarni boarded the near full bus with her two children and realising that it was jam-packed, came right at the back where we sat. The little boy clearly wanted the window seat by giving his mum a 'can I have that seat' look. I shifted. The mother smiled and thanked me; the children shifted towards the window side. She sat down next to me without any hesitation, her arms brushing against me making me shrink a bit, but she was easy and comfortable sitting next to an unknown male unlike a typical Indian woman. Right at this time and almost surprising everyone with its punctuality the bus groaned into life to make the twelve hour trip to Rishikesh.

My cousin Santuda and myself had trekked to Goumukh glacier from Gangotri and come back to catch the only bus travelling back to the plains. The trek was hard but rewarding in terms of the scenic aspect but we weren't exactly unhappy to get back to have a decent shower and meal once we've reached the proper human jungle. The journey had to be done and when we found that the only avaialable seats were at the back, we knew that the journey  would be bumpy and probably back breaking.
The woman wore white from head to toe - white salwar and white scarf covering her head. Her hands were delicate almost perfectly so with fingernails pale white. Her wrists were bare with out any bangles and as I glanced at her face in one quick instance, I noticed her without any jewellery - no earrings, no neck ornaments. Then it dawned on me; she must a widow. The bus in the meantime had been hurling towards Uttarkashi negotiating the twists and turns of the Garhwal Himalayas and at the back seat it was unavoidable that we'd be bumping against each other. In after one such acute turn I apologised to the lady. She told me not to worry in a perfect North American accent. Surprised, I asked her where she was from and what was she doing here in the pilgrimage land. She didn't reply at first, just glanced at her children, her eyes softening as she did that. She had one of the saddest eyes I'd ever seen. Then she told me that she's from  Montreal, Canada, travelling through the pilgrimage route in the Garhwal - Gangotri, Jamunotri, Kedar and Badrinathdham. She said her son was eight and daughter ten, and this is first time all three of them had been to India.
I'd met my husband in Canada, she said. He was the most kind and genuine, hardworking man she'd ever met. She was studying business administration and he was driving taxi cabs. The only thing that was common to them was their religion - both of them were Sikh. They married in spite of their social standings and family oppositions and spent eleven years together.
Then on the 25th of June, two years ago her husband boarded an Air India flight called Emperor Kanishka to New Delhi and was blown to smithereens along with 328 other people by Babbar Khalsa, a Sikh militant group in retaliation for operation Blue Star on the Golden temple. He was coming home for a pilgrimage that he promised himself for the birth of his children. I was never religious, she said. I wanted to come here to feel him - my husband, not God. She never believed in God and the tragedy has made her even more a non-believer. So what are you looking for? I asked. Some answers, any answers, she said.
They left the bus at Uttarkashi heading towards Hemkund Sahib. I saw them disappear in the midday sun amongst the thousands others. Big tragedies happen. They touch our lives, but we move on. What remains is the memory of the eye of the widow, looking at her children and then beyond into the Himalayas for an answer that's never there.

The Fortune-teller

The man was looking outside the window at the fast receding urban jungle which was now showing signs of the greenery of rural Bengal. His eyes were half closed and held a steady focus which dispelled any thoughts that he was sleepy or even daydreaming. His nose, rose like a shark fin from his forehead, and the nostrils with the nose hairs peeking out twitched from time to time.  He was humming a tune  and a thick exercise book with a green cover – the thickest you can possibly get – was open in his lap. Now and again, he would retrieve a ball point pen from behind his right ear, which was hid from view by a head full of untidy hair -  a cross between Rastafarian dreadlocks and Baul  like coiffure. His clothes were a standard Sadhu variety; saffron and orange with the colours faded to an almost indiscernible pale white in places.
We were travelling to Kumardhubi on a slow passenger train which stopped at every whistle-stop station on the way - literally. Bishuda, my cousin and greatest of friends, had a firebrick factory in the outskirts of the coal mining town and this was his treat for me, for getting into Medicine. The hot summer day was bearing down on us and the compartment had none of the ceiling fans working, and with the humanity crushing you from every side, this wasn’t a pleasant journey. In the heat which pored out of everybody in the compartment saturated the air with the sweaty body odour mixed with the bidi smoke, made the journey seem even longer. We certainly needed a diversion; a pass time.
Bishuda was itching to do something. He had three bouts of sugary tea with elaichi from the vendors and endless cigarettes and I could feel that he was looking for something, anything, to occupy himself. When he noticed the guy sitting next to the window, the man was writing into his notebook in a script which was somewhat familiar but indecipherable. Bishuda has this amazing quality to make friends. Let me rephrase that. He can make people fall in a friendship with him; be it a man of eighty or a child of eight. As soon as he laid his eye on that man beside the window, I knew what was coming.
Dada. You a poet?
The man looked at us. ‘Oh. I write a little bit.’ His eyes were less dreamy.
Can we hear it?
He hesitated. But when we pressed him, opened the tattered exercise book and  recited something which was clearly Odiya. His voice had a rough quality and he almost sang the poem. I’ve forgotten what it was but I remember his face and the tone of his voice and the crescendo and diminuendo of the tune. We came to know that he goes from place to place, country fairs to country fairs and that the road was his home. When asked how he survives, he replied almost apologetically, that he’s a prophesier.
Really, said Bishuda. Would you be kind enough to read my palm?
The man seemed hurt and somewhat offended. He was not a palmist or an astrologer, he said. Those are inaccurate science. So, how does he predict the future, we asked. By looking at peoples faces, he said.
Amazing, said Bishuda. Can you tell me anything about this brother of mine? He’s really in trouble. He’s left school you see and is mixing with the wrong crowd. Can you tell us what’ll happen to him? His mother is so worried about him.
I could see the man hesitated. He could sense the hint of challenge and the grain of mockery in the conversation. Look at me, he said. I looked at him.
Look at my eyes, he said. They were brownish black and very very still. I remember thinking at that time that his eyes were almost like stone; hardly any flicker of a movement. He put his thumb on my left temple and applied a gentle pressure. 
Not true, he abruptly said. You’re going far far away. You’re going to take care of sick people. You’re going to be doctor. But it’ll be far, far away.
He predicted a lot of things to me and Bishuda that day. They were mostly rubbish as far as I remember. But the fact of the matter is: he somehow got, two important aspects of my life exactly right.

The Rejected

I saw Kharij in a grubby, crumbling movie theatre near Sealdah station. It had discoloured corduroy seat covers with yellow foam poking out from numerous holes like adipose tissue and a projector running the movie in such dim light as if I was watching the movie wearing sunglasses. ’The near empty hall was a testimony to the fact that the movie, based on a Ramapada Chowdhury novel which came out a few years earlier in one of the puja editions of Desh or Anandabazar, was unlikely to give the two pennies worth of entertainment to the general public.  Furthermore, Mrinal Sen the auteur was an always uncompromising and frequently blatantly disdainful artist with his non-conformist leftist views on society, more often than not rather explicit in his depiction of those views in celluloid; which in turn made people very uncomfortable. 

The story had a simple premise. In an unusually cold winter morning in Kolkata, Anjan (Anjan Dutta) and Mamata (Mamata Shankar), a middle class couple find their eleven year old child-servant dead in a locked kitchen, apparently from carbon monoxide poisoning, by trying to keep warm from a open wood fire oven. What follows this tragedy is a masterful examination of the middle class emotive process in a crisis - guilt to self preservation and finally fearing retribution from the boys father who had left the boy to be looked after by the couple as their 'own'. The final scene of the movie is a masterclass of understated filmmaking by Sen - a significant departure from his style. The boy's father, wonderfully portrayed by Debatosh Ghosh, looks at Anjan and though his eyes asks the question 'why did this happen?' But simply states, Babu, Jai (Sir, I'll be on my way). I've never ever seen a movie end with such a simple piece of dialogue with such a devastating effect. And for this reason, for all the Mrinal Sen films which with overt and covert socialist overtures, none can come close to Kharij in terms of the lasting effect it has on your senses. 

Recently,  a fifteen year old employed as a helping hand to my mother, spent the very first night away from home. We wanted her to sleep on the bed but she declined saying that she'd always slept on the floor. The next day when I asked her how her sleep was, she said she was cold. The kitchen in my parent's apartment was small with a minuscule hole as a window but the saving grace was there was no wood fire; only modern gas. 

The next day, I flew back home and hoped that the extra blanket given to her would be enough as Kharij had been on my mind. Few days later, I got a ring from my mother. The girl was homesick and had gone back to her village.