Truth, Fiction & Satori

Every detail is important. The smallest things that they change about their appearance to look respectable and yet different; the media tools they use to take their lives with them wherever they go; the personalised schedule slots that they create for themselves so that suddenly those twenty minutes on the tube or the duration of the customised route that they have chosen for themselves, are the most precious moments of their day.

Till you find that you are listening to your unique playlist, thinking about how you would like to commute the next day, clutching a book in one hand, and rummaging around in your handbag for your own special, compact, make-up kit – and then it’s an interesting study in an entirely different way.

One day, when I’m going to be rich and famous and have a lot of time on my hands, I’ll probably use some of it to devise some sort of a machine that will extract the myriad thoughts that run through my head at a particular instant of time and put them on paper in neat, well spaced paragraphs. I can’t even begin to imagine the sort of exhilaration that I’ll experience when it won’t take me eons to form a sentence that seems slightly, if not completely, befitting of my thought. The machine will present before my ever-forgiving audience, a bunch of sentences that will singularly explain what I want to say without distorting my original intent with metaphors, cryptic references or bad grammar.

I’ll carry the machine around with me at all times because I would have ensured its compactness. In all probability, it won’t have a moment’s peace because my life will slowly come to involve constant observation of the world, its inhabitants and their exceedingly pointless actions.

Just contemplating the innumerable possibilities is consoling, to say the least. I probably won’t have a breakdown in my system even at those rare times when I’m feeling slightly morose and am compelled to look outside a window in a moving vehicle, any vehicle, at life- disconnected, disjoint and only vaguely familiar; flitting past by, so completely and disturbingly unaware of my inconsequential existence. I’ll never fall in love with a guy simply because I want to ruffle his hair every time I look at him. My machine will help me create an ode or two about how perfect his hair is for the simple act of ruffling and I’ll never think of him again, except perhaps with a tinge of mild amusement. I’ll spend lesser time dwelling on all the forms of entertainment that occupy so much space in my head because I replay movies/songs/comics/books long after I’m done with them, thereby eliminating all obstacles in the path of real thought, enabling it to flow more freely and with more originality.

I’ll write more stories, because I’ll look for them everywhere; in every pair of eyes that I look into, in every awkward silence that I encounter and in every nostalgic moment that I indulge myself in. Not that I don’t try to do those things on an unnervingly regular basis right now. But I’ll do them with more conviction and more selflessness when I have my machine at handy. I might even cease to be the most important person in my life. I’ll cease to believe that I can tell a story with any amount of justice, if at all, only if it’s my own, only if all the information is first-hand and extremely personal.

Life will become comfortable, coherent and if I’m lucky, a little easier.

But, I know that there is little possibility of this machine ever coming into existence and if it ever did, I’ll probably be stupid enough to consider it a tad bit unethical. So, I’ll just go ahead and argue that life is interesting the way it is. That entertainment is supposed to overwhelm and that beauty is supposed to cause silences, awkward as they may be. And anyway, till date, the written word has always been given second preference on my priority lists. Even if that’s the case only because I’m too lazy to try anymore and end up fascinated by something as trivial as a periodically blinking cursor on a drab, white, computer screen.

The canvas roofed, military jeep is speeding on a 45 km long stretch of road. We are driving to the Sam Sand Dunes, the only reason that I flatly refused a trip to Mount Abu instead of Jaisalmer. For the first few moments, I try my hardest to keep my hair flattened down, try my hardest not to squint my eyes due to the glaring, omnipresent sunlight. Dahiya uncle, as the Sergeant who is acting as our guide, likes to be called is sitting in the front seat beside the driver and pointing excitedly towards the remotest signs of life on either side of the road. I give up on my hair and look outside, at increasing nothingness. Acres of dry land all around, as though it had accepted its fate, merely given up on the very thought of rain, an occasional cactus, an occasional camel, sand blown over on the road by the wind. Our jeep is the only vehicle on the entire road. I lose all sense of time, all sense of thought and feel like I’m flying every time the jeep goes over a bump. One part of my mind tells me that this is it. This is what I have always imagined Rajasthan to be like. Not a bunch of ancient forts and palaces, not a group of banjaras on every other street and definitely not the sight of my first camel.

The jeep comes to a stop before a group of locals who look like Pathans with sun burnt faces, in kurtas with those crazy long sleeves. The sand dunes are stretched out before us, as though compelling us to make some comment about their magnificence. The first immediate feeling I feel is disappointment. It looks a lot smaller than I had imagined. The air is absolutely still, the sands dunes aren’t shifting and I don’t see a mirage. I come out of my reverie when I hear Dahiya uncle arguing about the cost of the camel rides. It seems terribly pointless; he is making it out as though we should be given rides for free but knows exactly how much money the rides are going to cost us. It’s an entertaining game of bargain that will end in a draw and everyone is playing along with complete enthusiasm.

Two kids point my cousin and me towards two dull looking camels that look so bored and indifferent about their existences that I don’t have the slightest desire to disturb them. The kids quietly nudge their respective camels and urge us to climb on them. A bump, a squeal and a two later, we find ourselves on top of a camel each, quietly trotting away in seemingly periodic motions, on the sand dunes. The initial feeling that the sand dunes were small in magnitude immediately dissolves away, giving place to a general, prevailing sense of awe.

The kid in charge of my camel is called Salim. He is a little shy and it takes some tact to get him to talk. He eventually tells me that my camel is called Micahel Jackson. Salim tells me it is tradition to name camels after heroes. I quickly hide an oncoming smirk at this ridiculously innocent statement to find that Shalu is turning towards me, shouting that her camel is called Raja Hindustani and that the kid in charge of Raja H is Ali. At this instant, I forgive the weather for being so unbearably sticky and hot, I forgive the discomfort of the bus journey from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer and I forgive my camera’s batteries for dying out on me at crucial moments. In short, I forgive every unnerving technicality that crossed my mind from the moment I entered Rajasthan.

Salim and Ali seem to have come to an unspoken agreement about stopping our camels. They tell us that we should look around and try and get a feel of the place. The sand dunes strewn about all around us in apparent symmetrical heaps, finally give us what they were supposed to, the same thing that the ocean and the sky give anyone if they make up their minds about it- a brief glimpse of infinity.

I get a slight feeling of regret at not having come here during the evening to watch the sunset or during the night to watch a clear sky lit up with a million stars. The feeling passes. Rajasthan was always the desert. My mind is silenced, a little too overcome by beauty to argue. This is it. This and the light, melodious and slightly melancholic strains of an ektara played by a man wearing a turban, sitting on a charpai in a fort in Jodhpur.

“I just had the most loveliest idea!” Rita Turner said.
It was their twenty seventh wedding anniversary. They’d decided to celebrate it in a small cafe, a couple of blocks away from their twenty-year-old house. At six in the evening, they were to leave whatever they were doing and rush to the café. It couldn’t really be called a celebration, more of an acknowledgement actually but a pleasant one nevertheless.
Dennis Turner had been wiping his glasses because the smoke from his hot coffee had clouded them. He seemed to be in no great hurry. He continued to wipe his glasses for a while as though it were suddenly the most interesting thing to do and finally looked up at Rita. She looked like she was out of breath. She also looked soaking wet. More importantly however, she looked like she was going to burst any moment if she didn’t tell him what she considered to be her “most loveliest idea”. Dennis decided to ignore the last part for a bit.
“You are forty-six minutes late,” said Dennis.
“It was raining, Dennis I had to look for my umbrella!” said Rita.
“You don’t seem to have been successful in finding it. Unless it was that black umbrella…How many times have I told you to throw that black umbrella of yours? It’s ancient! I suspect the age is trying to compete with the number of holes that it has.”
He was trying to be stern with her. She needed to learn the importance of punctuality.
“Your American sneakers were getting wet, they needed it.”
For the briefest of moments, he wondered how she always managed to say the one thing that she knew would melt his heart. He then proceeded to twist his face into an expression of partial disdain and what he thought to be evident disinterest.
“I waited for forty minutes and then I bought a cup of coffee for myself. You only get a glass of lemonade now. Without sugar.” He added.
Rita thought that was unfair. She loved coffee, especially in the evenings, especially on important evenings. She was about to retort but decided against it. They usually took turns at keeping things peaceful.
Dennis noticed that Rita was still standing. He got up, pulled up a chair for her and then sat down again. She used to protest at this tendency of his towards women, something that seemed to her as forced chivalry. Initially, she had tried suggesting they split the bill, she held out the door open for him at times and she pretty much pulled up her own chairs. But now, she had gotten used to it. In fact, there were times when she quite enjoyed the attention. It made her feel like there was an eternity stretched out before them, waiting patiently to be experimented with, waiting to be bent into a shape that would be unique only to him and her. Unlike all her friends, she had refused to join the yoga classes that they’d started in their locality. They’d all begun complaining that there was too much time. Dennis and Rita had never really had a problem with time. Their relationship had reached a state of familiarity that made her sleep peacefully at night. It ran on amazingly predictable lines. He was going to ask her about that clock any moment…
“Did you clean that old clock like I asked you to?” said Dennis.
“Oh sorry dear, that completely slipped my mind. It’s just this idea I was thinking about, see?” said Rita.
“Do you think they’ll remember?”
“I’m sure they will, dear….Dennis! What are you doing?”
He had torn open the little paper bag that contained sugar, all of which was currently lying in a heap on the table. He first flattened the heap with his palm and then began making patterns with his index finger.
“I said no sugar. I’m bored, Rita.”
I’m bored. Like how are you or I love you. Clichéd phrases that were said only once in a while just so the other person would know when he/she really meant it.
“I wish I had cancer or the supposedly dreaded Alzheimer’s disease. Hell, I wouldn’t even have minded insomnia.”
And then there would be statements that contradicted the previous one- out of the blue strings of thought that didn’t mean a thing.
“Remember all those strange comics that Michael used to collect?” Rita said.
Michael was their younger son. He was twenty five and was studying Economics in London.
“The ones you threw out because they seemed to be a little too obscure for a fifteen year old? Yes, of course.”
“I didn’t throw them out you know. I found them today, stacked up in the cupboard under the old clock. With crumbling yellow pages and a sheet of paper that listed all of them in that crazily legible writing of his...”
“It’s been a long time, Rita. He’s probably forgotten all about it.”
“I don’t think he has. I don’t think he ever will.”
She took a sip of her lemonade, immediately flinching because it was too bitter. Dennis watched her. They were growing old. He wondered how she still managed to surprise him. He could see her eyes light up when she would have discovered those comics. He could feel the adrenalin rush, the furious activity in her body when an impulsive thought was being transmitted through a million neurons in her head. He knew exactly what her idea was.
“We’ll book tickets tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay. Do you think it’ll make him happy?”
“I’m sure it will, sweetheart. Don’t drink anymore of the lemonade, I’ll get you a cup of coffee.”

We live next to a place called Beninganahalli.

Yes, B-e-n-i-n-g-a-n-a-h-a-l-l-i.

The shortest route to my school (1.2 Km) passed through the place and so, I had to walk through it every afternoon. If I was alone, a major part of my journey was carried out at a pace that comes in handy when you have to navigate yourself safely through a muddy, crowded and uncomfortably narrow lane.

Shops. Rows of them. Standing erect, in a haphazard way. Begging you, pleading with you, not to pay any attention to them. A vegetable shop next to a clothes one. A butcher’s shop next to a bakery. It was an explosion of resources and the perfect distribution of goods. Everyone probably buys everything else from the neighboring shop. I don’t know what it was about the place, but it always made me feel like I’d taken a wrong turn, stepped into a magic doorway and landed up in an undesirable destination. It was wearing the ring that rules all and entering Diagon Alley that was turned upside down after being beaten with a goblet shaped portkey.

When it wasn't flooded by the water from a broken pipe, or stagnating rain water collected in big ditches, then it was just a matter of shifting your gaze before you realized that you lived in a world of Maya, nay, that the world itself was Maya. Beninganahalli was, in fact, always flooded with street vendors, boards, banners that claimed to give you 75% discount and all the other paraphernalia that comes with little shops.

There would be auto rickshaws with loud speakers that blared out some random Kannada songs. There would be eunuchs, weird looking guys selling colored chickens and crazy ascetics who beat themselves with a whip. I hated having to pass by this repeatedly irritating sequence of events every day. I was a stranger in someone else’s town, a casual passerby that was forced to persist in her presence every afternoon. A disjoint element in a world that was frightening to me.

A buzz of activity was my sole companion. And I used to walk through the crowd, with my head bent low. Thinking about the restaurant that I’d been to last night. About how satisfying it was to eat my food, sitting by the beautiful glass window that gave me a view of the fast paced, sonorous, eclectic world that I belonged to. A world without much meaning attached to it. Which is why, a lot of people became excited with the possibility of 42 being the answer, which of course, Douglas Adams came up with just like that. Six by Nine. While I would be thinking about all that, I would catch a glimpse of a skillet with meat on it, turning slowly over a tandoor. Adjacent to it, there would be a carton containing dead, rotting fish. The fast food stall would be located right next to an open drain. Fast food stalls that I hoped I would never have to eat in.

Buildings were always being broken down to make place for new ones, which in turn would stay new and overshadow their companions for a day or two, only to camouflage with their surroundings at the end of that period. They tarred the road occasionally and it rewarded them by coming back to its original state.

In spite of all this, it never stops visitors from coming and going as they please. It gives them the freedom to form stubborn opinions and think thoughts of their own. I’ve imagined myself coming back to it, years later and finding it as I’ve always remembered it or as I’ve always tried to remember it. It would be one of those rare cases when there was no resistance to change because change never came in the way. I would look at it, get nostalgic and then support a guilty conscience because I never really liked the place. So, I decided to write about it. In the hope that perhaps, years later, I would realize that I was fascinated by this world, wonderstruck by the aura it created around itself. A world so wrapped up in itself that it could not be penetrated or broken into.

Right now, Beninganahalli’s memories don’t really mean anything to me. For all immediate purposes, it is a chapter in my past. I think about it at times, when the speakers play their inane music, loud enough to reach my room’s window. Or when my brother comes home crying one day because some moron threw an egg at him.

Good old Beninganahalli, located at the mean point of a pendulum.

B-e-n-i-n-g-a-n-a-h-a-l-l-i.

Right now, it’s just a really difficult word to spell out without having to repeat myself half a dozen times when I’m ordering pizza over the phone.

My brother and I never really went to any formal classes. My mum tried her hardest to send me for Carnatic Music Singing classes but I was a stubborn kid and she was eventually forced to admit defeat. Our summers were spent in long train journeys to Bangalore, in playing meaningless games with our prodigious circle of friends and in pursuing constant ventures of whiling away time. While most of my friends and cousins complained about how the best part of their day was taken up by Dance lessons or Art classes or some such highly productive activity, I sat around with a smug expression on my face and gave descriptive narratives of the last TaleSpin episode to gullible, cartoon deprived souls.

We somehow managed to learn the things that were really essential or important to us without undergoing any formal training. I don’t know the difference between butterfly stroke and breast stroke but I can swim to save my life. If I attempted to skate on one of those humungous skating rinks (like the one that appears in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Free Falling video) I would probably end up in a hospital but I can put on roller skates or roller blades, maintain my balance and even move around for a while without looking like a spastic. I can sing without initiating homicidal tendencies in the unfortunate lot who end up listening to me. Basically, the over used, yet extremely apt, Jack-of-all-trades and master of none theory has always been applied to provide any sort of justification to curious relatives or arrogant friends.

The only time I tried to do anything constructive was to go for guitar classes when I was thirteen because I thought it would be the coolest thing in the universe to tell people that I could play the guitar. I got bored of learning how to play Christian hymns by the end of two months. The classes weren’t too memorable and I still don’t know how to read music, play scales or anything remotely professional of that sort. But, it doesn’t really make too much of a difference. You can go through your formative, appreciation-thirsty, adolescent life by knowing a couple of basic chords and that’s that.

In different stages of low self-esteem or desperate moments of ennui, I’ve wanted to do different things but the urges have passed with fleeting speeds. Perhaps the only thing that has remained constant all these years, the only thing that I’ve always wanted to learn is how to play the piano. Violins are classy but I didn’t know that when I was six. Guitars are nice but they aren’t very satisfying unless you have a tremendous amount of patience or have John McLaughlin’s genes. I wanted to play the piano. The sort of piano that Elton John played, the piano in November Rain, the piano that appeared in ever rich, palatial house in almost every Bollywood movie that I saw.

Due to sheer laziness or supreme haughtiness, I never did anything about it and as always, owing to the fact that we weren’t a sophisticated, rich family with a piano in our living room, I was forced to make do with poor substitutes. My dad bought me a menial SA-21 when I was nine. It was the sort of keyboard, which had some twenty keys and I don’t even know how many notes that is. The sort of keyboard on which if you try and play with both hands, try to do a Chopin, you see it all end. But I was unfazed and with overwhelming hopes of owning a piano at least by the time I was twenty one, I learned how to play everything I possibly could with one hand. I didn’t know chords or scales but I could play monotonous, yet extremely pleasant sounding tunes. I convinced myself that if I could play Jingle Bells without mistakes then I could play anything.

One night, my dad’s friend invited us over for dinner. Their kids had this huge Yamaha and I was terribly excited that I could finally show off my natural talents. By now, I was certain that I had a 'feel for music'. Just after dinner, when we were waiting for dessert to be served, the older kid decided to give us a performance. The girl was a year older than me and she played a small part of Moonlight Sonata. She really knew her stuff. Right from the first note, struck with both her hands and with just the right amount of confidence, till the small bow that she gave when she was finished. It was as if my entire world collapsed in three minutes of awed spectatorship. The tumult of emotions that I experienced that night still makes me feel a little dizzy. After that, I of course gave up on all my piano playing dreams and the SA-21 was stowed away to the deepest corner of my cupboard, removed in the years to come only to play some horrendous patriotic song, for the occasional Inter-house- group song competition.

One of my favorite episodes of Wonder Years is Episode 7, Season 2 in which Kevin Arnold gives up piano lessons because he thinks that Ronald Hirschmuller plays Pachelbel’s Canon better than him. I watched the episode today for probably the 8th time. In the end, as Kevin watches Ronald playing the piano in his piano teacher Mrs Carples’ house, as he proceeds to cycle in a zigzag way towards the approaching darkness, the older Kevin voice over says a lot of enlightening, characteristically heart breaking things but today I just listened to him with a conditioned, wistful look in my eyes. All I could really hear was Ronald playing Pachbelbel’s Canon, in that perfect way of his, on the piano. In fact, all I could really hear was the piano and suddenly there was nothing that I wanted in the world more than to play that piece. Suddenly the lump in my throat was so over powering that it made me scrimmage through all the endless, piling junk in my cupboard, till I found my decaying SA-21.

I know some things shouldn’t be spoken about. That some things are best realized. But, just because I like maintaining a record of such things, just because, however hard I try, the Entertainment industry always seems to say things in a better, more effective way, I have to make a mention of this conversation. It happens soon after Kevin tells Mrs Carples that he wants to quit his lessons.
‘Mrs Carples: “That’s not the point, who’s better, who’s worse. I mean, that’s not music! That’s not what it is about! Sit down! Sit down. I want you to play something for me. Pachelbel Canon in D major. It’s my final request.”
Kevin sits down and plays the piece and while he’s playing it,
Old Kevin voice over: “All of a sudden, as I started to play, it was like, there was electricity flowing through my veins. Suddenly, I could do no wrong.”
He finishes playing and Mrs Carples says, “There. That’s what music is about.”

The brief moment of panic when you run around all over the house, looking for five batteries to put into your keyboard, the one hour of desperation that you spend rewinding and fast-forwarding the last bit of the episode till Pachelbel Canon in D major becomes an acquired ear worm, the small sigh of relief when you figure that you can finally play the piece. One hand and no chords but you can play it. Without mistakes. That's what music is about.