Tales of one Village-An Old Timer Tells a Story

It has been couple of months and no letter from Nisha. Questions began to swirl in my head, most of them unpleasant, perhaps illogical and irrelevant too. Before I draw any negative conclusions I must write to her. I had an ulterior motive too. In receiving a letter from her I could replace my brother’s lost stamp.

I began. I had disappointed Viku, I wrote, when I tore up the envelope your last letter came in. 

Nisha knows we call my kid brother Vikram Viku.

I said he sulked, he pouted, he avoided my eye contacts; and rightly. I mutilated his stamp. I had hurt him. I could not be forgiven; at least for a short time. It troubled me to have hurt him.  I promised to make it up to him by helping him with his homework. I also told him I will replace the stamp when Nisha writes to me again. He smiled. He is so easy to please! You know how I love him.

More importantly I wrote I had bad news for her. I asked if she still remembered ‘Aunty’, our neighbor. Few days earlier she had died in her sleep.

I began to give her some of the accounts of the day before and the day after the night of her demise. 

I wrote, as I was describing how I would make it up to him to Viku, I heard our next door neighbor’s voice talking to my mother in the next room. It was not early but the morning seemed to have arrived late that day. It was aunty’s youngest son. The man spoke softly and somberly. I could not hear anything but I sensed the urgency in his voice. Something was wrong. As he left the house my mother said she has to go next door and I must handle rest of the morning chores myself. The old woman whom you and I, both, knew only as ‘aunty’ had died in her sleep previous night. She apparently died of old age; a disease that kills more than any other disease I have known. There is no cure for it either.  It made me sad; really sad. As you know, at deaths the neighbors here come together as much as or perhaps even more, they do at any other happier times

As you may remember, the old woman had a very raspy but distinct and an authoritarian voice; a voice of a person who had seen times; hard and soft. You will agree that she had as many wrinkles as the days of her life to prove it.  Whenever she knocked at the door or even walked in if the door was open I knew it was three thirty in the afternoon; tea time for us. She was like a clock-work. One could set time by her. The old timer did not even know how to read time. But I did not hold that against her. I liked her. You did not. You disliked her because of her authoritarian style, especially towards children. She thought, perhaps, she had earned the right to reprimand them by the very virtue of being old. I do not know how they view this in Canada but out here we are very accommodating towards old people chiding children.

I do not have to tell you that it is quite customary, in villages, to walk in on to any acquaintance, neighbor or relative in their own house. Even at odd hours. It is only hospitable for the visited to welcome them and offer something to eat or drink. We even share from our own plates. I believe we have quite an evolved sense of hospitality.

This woman of eighty five, with a family of three sons and their wives and five grand children visited us almost every afternoon at tea time. She only known as aunty had been a fixture in this area for a long time. She lived in her house as long as she had been alive.  She was born there and now she died there. Very few fortunate people, I think, seem to have that fortune. I know your family was not very enthusiastic about her visits. She liked to visit my mother, often at inopportune times. But we did not mind because she made us laugh, as well as sometimes cry, with her stories. Often she entertained us with songs in her folksy style which would tell stories of times gone by; songs of simpler, kinder times, which also included, wedding songs and dirges.  

She knew all the gossip, dirt and history of who moved in and who moved out of this village and when. Many tales were about the people we had never met or seen. They came and went before we called this village our home. They lived here before even your family moved here.

 If somebody was writing a history of this village I would most assuredly send them to her for stories. It would make an interesting and humorous reading.

Now get this, the day before her death she visited us as usual. She took tea with us, as always. But never from China wares. To her they were impure. We had to maintain one set of cup and saucer made from what was then known as German Silver. 

I began to complain about how the municipality is rationing the water and how it is insufficient for our large family’s needs. This conversation led up to the times when the village people had neither indoor water supply nor plumbing. She admonished me and asked me to stop complaining. We, meaning, she and her friends of same age from the town in their times used to walk a mile or so to wells outside the town to draw and fetch water. The water thus collected was brought home in three graduated pots stacked up high on their heads. One small pot would rest in the crook of their waist. Walking long distances balancing the pots on the heads was not easy. It was hard work, she said. We used water frugally. You should do the same, she advised. 

Talking about the plumbing, let me tell you a funny story of our times, she said. It is she talking now. We did not even have rudimentary toilets, let alone the flush toilets now-a-days. The people, men and women both, used the same open fields for their daily toilet needs. It was obvious that everybody could see every town person’s rear end at the crucial time.  Since it was a personal and private activity people would wake up when it was still dark. Women went together, as if for a walk. If someone was late in waking they provided wake up calls by throwing small stones at their windows. Likewise, men went together. On the way often men and women will catch up with one another. They all avoided eye contacts and refused to recognize one another. 

Funny part was, she added, all women covered their faces while walking to the field. I asked her why. Because she said we did not want our rear ends matched up with our faces by the men folks. 

I laughed till my stomach hurt. Tears started rolling down my cheeks. I think I miss her, I will always miss her. She was one of a kind.

I hoped Nisha and her family was well. Do write, I pled sincerely. I have many other stories to share, but they will have to wait until I hear from you, I ended.

  

Rag Jaijaiwanti

I am thinking of my father a lot today. In his memory I am posting a favorite Rag of his; Rag: Jaijaiwanti sung beautifully by Pundit Jasraj.

Golden Globe Awards-2014

Sandra Bullock Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP 

The Organizers, flushed with money, of this highly anticipated award ceremony did not pay attention to sitting arrangement. It was an obstacle course for the winners to get to the stage to accept their awards. Winners were literally body rubbing with people seated at the tables. 

I watch it only to see the fashionable and not so fashionable dresses women wear at the ceremony. 

I like clothes.

Neil Tyson-An Astro-Physicist with a funny side

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The Astro-Physicist Neil Tyson was being interviewed by Lynn Sherr in Parade Magazine of Sunday Chicago Tribune-01/12/14. During the shoot for the magazine he tells jokes to the team of photographers. Bhupen and I laughed out loud when Bhupen read them to me. 

One goes like this:

"A Higgs boson goes into a church. 

And the priest says 'We do not allow Higgs bosons here.' 

And the Higgs boson says, 'But without me there is no mass'.

Bada bing!"

The second one goes like this:

 "A photon walks into a bar and orders a drink'. 

The bartender says,'Do you want a double?'

And the photon says, 'No I'm travelling light'.

Bada boom!"

Who knew Astro Physicists could be funny!!!!

Tales of one village-Street Entertainers

Tales of One Village
Street Entertainers
(1)

The postman rang. I heard my mother say it is a letter from Canada. 

Nisha has not written to me for some time. I wondered what news she has for me this time.

I was finishing up my daily laundry work before the water was turned off. The rainless monsoon created usual shortage of water. It made it difficult for the municipality to supply water for more than four hours in the mornings and four hours in the evenings. In this country water is money and must be used like money, frugally and stringently.

Nisha and I became friends when her bank manager father was transferred to our village and they rented the empty house opposite ours. They were four; the father, the mother, a brother and Nisha. We were of the same age; fifteen. We took to each other in spite of our class differences. We walked holding hands to the same school; same grades. We enjoyed each others’ company and shared teen agers’ games, giggles and gossips. Often she recommended some books for me to read.

As is usually the case with bankers her father got transferred once again after three years in our village to another part of the country. We grew up and we grew apart until I received an invitation for her wedding six years later. I was pleasantly surprised. I wrote to her with a small gift that I was happy to receive the invitation, that it was kind of her to remember me and that I am very sorry not to be able to attend and that I sincerely wish her blissful married life.

After marriage I had heard she moved to Toronto, Canada. Once there she started to write to me glowingly about her more than comfortable life there.

I tore open the envelope my mother handed me and with it too the postage stamp. My kid brother looked glaringly at me. I ruined his stamp in spite of his repeated reminders not to do so. He is the philatelist in the family. He will now have one less stamp for his collection which did not sit very well with him. I will appease him later. For now I must read this letter.

Nisha wrote that she is sorry not to have written in a long while because her just turned five year old son, had taken ill; nothing serious just common chicken pox. He is better now. For his fifth birthday parents decided to treat him to an outing to “Cirque de Soleil”. She described how thoroughly he enjoyed the circus. His favorite was the clown act. He was amazed at the trapeze artists clad in all glitters scaling up and gliding down effortlessly from great heights with the help of colorful silken cloths. He grimaced when he saw petit Asian girls contorting their bodies into pretzels.

She added that the outing was not exactly a cheap affair.  But for their son nothing was too expensive. Parents can never overdo things for their children; she wisdom-ized.

I suppose that must be so. Or is it?

Have you ever seen such a show, she asked perhaps, rhetorically. She wished I was there with them, she added again fancifully.

She ended sincerely with the thought that all was well with her family and she will anxiously wait for my response.

I needed few days to formulate and organize my thoughts on how to respond. Finally, I replied that it was so good of her to write even if it was after a long time. I am glad to read that her son is better and that they had grand time with him at the circus.

I wrote that I have never seen a circus such as she described and perhaps never will. I was sure she had seen, with me, what I was about to describe. What we had seen years ago, I wrote, was a troupe of all male cast, some of whom took on female roles, while putting on a street show of our mythological stories, usually at nights. Acting, dialogue, costume and make up all too cheap to be considered a high class entertainment. I reminded her that they were gypsies eking out a living from the few coins thrown reluctantly into their tin cups by the spectators.

If she remembered, once we saw a family of four, I wrote; a mother, a father, a very young boy of a son and a teenage daughter putting on a similar but not quite so similar a show on the street where we lived. The man beat his drum to invite the passers by to stop and watch, in his words, a hitherto unseen show. When enough of a crowd had gathered he began. They had two leashed monkeys and one scrawny little black bear. All underfed and most likely inhumanely trained to jump at the man’s command. Bear danced as the man’s baton moved. The father officiated a mock wedding between the male and the female monkeys. The crowd clapped and laughed when the female monkey acted coy, on cue, toward male monkey’s romantic advances.

The mother sang folk songs and the son ran around collecting coins if any of the spectators were willing to part with them. The daughter danced to mother’s singing. The father was giving a running commentary on, while still drumming, the difficult feat his courageous son was about to undertake while walking on tight rope high up above. The rope was tightly held up by four rickety posts tied together at the top creating a tent-ish look on either side. The boy was ready. The audience fell silent. The father helped the boy up and handed him a pole to balance himself with. This perilous task was being undertaken, the father said, just to entertain his esteemed and discerning audience. There was no safety net under the rope to catch the boy if he fell.

As careful and cautious a performer he was, on this day the boy lost his balance and fell on concrete ground. He suffered a fracture in his right forearm. Instantaneously the arm looked misaligned. Now it was beginning to swell. Neither an ambulance nor a doctor was requested or called. The man wrapped the boy’s arm in a piece of rag and concluded the show without really finishing. The mother was in tears. The daughter began to cringe. Crowd unwilling to fling coins to help let alone for the fun they had began to disperse. Quickly. Nobody cared.

I asked Nisha if she remembered the scene. Perhaps not, I assumed on her behalf.

Few months later, I continued, I saw the same family putting on the same show again. This time the boy’s arm looked grotesquely deformed. This time it was his sister who walked the tight rope instead of the boy. He no longer could perform the same feats he did before. The broken bone had healed but had not set well. Obviously, he did not receive medical care; only because the man could not afford it. He may have, possibly, also seen this as blessing in disguise. He may have thought, perhaps the audience will fling extra coins out of pity looking at the boy’s ugly arm. He was using his son to his own ends.

I concluded the reply with an assurance to her that she is fortunate and that she should clutch on to her luck. But it may not always be possible for all parents to say that nothing is too good for their children.

I ended lovingly with a request and a promise that if she wrote I will reply.

The Lazarus Project-By Aleksandar Hemon

I liked his recent book so much I picked up another from the library.

It is The Lazarus Project. The book opens with a nineteen year old Bosnian immigrant Lazarus Averbuch knocking at the door of the police chief of Chicago, George Shippy, to deliver a letter. The officer instead of accepting the envelope shoots the deliverer twice to kill. Almost hundred years since the killing a writer of Bosnian pedigree, Brik,  takes an interest in the murder to write about the truth in his new book. He must go to Bosnia to retrace the murdered man's history. But he has no money. An elderly rich lady offers him a grant to carry out the project; all expenses paid. The writer takes a photographer named Rora to accompany him.

I must say I was disappointed a little. The Bosnian trip did not add to the understanding nor the whys and wherefores of the incident hundred or so years prior. Except for the fact that the writer found graves of Averbuch's forerunners, the trip was made, it appears,  merely to provide the visuals of a ramshackle region of Eastern Europe. It created the pictorial history of the time when the project was undertaken; scenes of poverty, corruption, indifference, prostitution and everything else that goes with a society that is over run by powerful regimes. Was the trip taken to fill the pages with the descriptions only?  The book is roughly three hundred pages and half of it is about the trip itself with no detective work on boy's life before Chicago which was the intent of the trip.

Granted, the title has "Project" in its name. It is supposed to be a writing project. So thinking back, it is not supposed to have forensic features within its writing.  But a picture of an "Eye" on the cover misled me. 

I do believe part of trip could have been abridged.

I am charmed by this author's writing. The words and the style of their usage are just un-parallel. I have liked very few authors. Among them are Vladimir Nobokov, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John La Carre with few others and now Aleksandar Hemon. As a matter fact while reading the earlier book of his someone was quoted to have likened him to Nobokov. I disagree. I think he is more in line with John La Carre in that his weaving in and out of now and then, here and there is similar but quite remarkable. As much as I like La Carre I consider Hemon a notch better in that he does not lose the reader. He is constantly kept abreast.

I will definitely read other books by him. 

Abstract 121413

Abstract 121413

Abstract 121313

Abstract 121313

The Book of my lives; A Book, Reviewed

About two weeks ago I was to read couple of my poems published in Journal of Modern Poetry issue # 16 to an audience of poets at St. Augustine College Campus. Bhupen and I were about ten to fifteen minutes early. Our venue, The Chaplin Hall, was occupied by another audience who were intently listening to a reader at the podium.

We had read a little blurb affixed to the door before entering the room. The reader’s name is Aleksandar Hemon. He has won many prestigious grants and accolades. We peeked inside the room and ushered ourselves into empty seats. I did not know what he was reading from but assumed that it must be his latest book. In few minutes that I heard him I had no reason to get the picture of the content and the style of his writing. As a courtesy, we stayed on.

As he finished reading the excerpts from his creation he began to sign the books for those among the audience who bought his book. I without thinking bought one and had it signed by him.

On the way home I was beginning to cuss myself for having bought the book by an author I had no knowledge of. I knew I was not going to like it and therefore will not read it. I have been disappointed in almost all books I have read, especially if they are fictions. Dialogues in any book bore me to tears.

Well, I started to read this book. I read few pages every time I read it. And within two readings I began to like his style and the content; actually I loved it. On the third sitting I was so riveted that I refused to close the book without finishing it. And finish it I surely did!

It is more or less a memoir of a displaced Bosnian émigré; displaced from his own country and his adopted country as well; the USA. In his country due to changing winds and here due to new culture. It is a story of breaking-up of war riddled nation. It is a story of youths wanting to defy; change the nation if not the world. It is a story of friendships, experimentation. It is a story of family separated by circumstances. It is a story of colors, smells and sounds of times of growing up. It is a story of finding semblances of life and then losing it. It is a story of unfathomable tragedy.

Each chapter is a story; a life unto itself.

The stories became intensely absorbing because of the landscape it created. The backdrop of a society that was closed for so long to outside world makes it so; a communistic, a rigid, a constrictive society that youths want to free and change against the powerful regime and yet not want to lose the sense of where one belonged and came from. This sense of belonging matters profoundly. 

While not from such society myself, I still do identify.Most immigrants suffer displacements.

The author has the style I adore. I have not read one like this before. I will cite couple of excerpts here. At one point he writes:

"In this city, I had no human network within which I could place myself; my Sarajevo, the city that had existed inside me and was still in there, was subject to siege and destruction. My displacement was metaphysical to the precisely same extent to which it was physical. But I couldn’t live nowhere; I wanted from Chicago what I’d got from Sarajevo; a geography of the soul.”

At another point he writes "……..Peter’s outburst, shocking though it may have been, made perfect sense to me-not only did he deplore the waste of words, he detested the moral lassitude with which they were wasted.”

                                                          

Now this is the language from a man to whom not only English is a second language, but also the one who knew no English at all when he arrived in USA.

I can say two things; if I were to make as good a story in my life as his life made for him I had to live his kind of life; I have to live in his skin. Second, if I were to write as well as he does, I will have to be born again.

I am comforted by the fact that he shares with me the same beautiful skyline of Chicago.

Tuber Roses-রজনীগন্ধা

Tuber Roses-রজনীগন্ধা

Yesterday afternoon I received a bouquet of not Roses, but Tuber Roses-রজনীগন্ধা. Then, unexpectedly a Bengali friend who almost never calls, called. I had a pleasant Calcutta moment; several moments; actually, the rest of the day.

It became a very special day.

None of the flowers grown in American hothouses, even Roses, disappointingly, emit the scent they are known to have. Surprisingly, Tuber Rose fragrance has enveloped my entryway. Going up or down the stairs I inhale that familiar intoxicating perfume.

Thanks to all who made this experience possible.