Disco Juliet

From the garish pout to the clingy tights, the broad spectacles to the suicide shade of blonde, the picturisation of the song Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits is 80's all the way! The sound, uniquely Knopfler only adds to it.
My wonder years, my back pages...
The starkness of white combined with the loudest of colours to create, I think, the worst fashion phase! But who cares??? How many of us would dare to flaunt green stilts with fuchsia lipstick, metal loops and leather jackets,today? That too, with such effortless panache!
Minimalism? It was symptomatic of bad fashion sense then!
Such riotously carefree, colourful times!

Whoever burst the pink-bubble!!!

Bikash Bhattacharya and his Durgas

I am not a connoisseur, critic or even a student of art. Terms, jargon and sometimes, even nuances, elude me. But I'd like to believe nonetheless, that I am, as much as anyone else, endowed with an innate aesthetic sensibility that does not necessarily require formal training. And the paintings of Bikash Bhattacharya appeal to me precisely for this power they have, to touch that raw, untrained chord. His portrayal of women, in particular-with which, I was initiated into Bikash's world of magic-realism-left me in awe and in love with the man for life! One has only to see his Durga-series to know what I mean. The artist's brush seemed to glide over the canvas as gently as a lover's caress; the desire to know and discover the body of the woman, as ardent and real as that of a flesh-and-blood lover, seeped through with every careful stroke. Painting after painting. Durga after Durga.
In many ways, he paved the way for the typification of the 'ideal Bengali' woman; goddess-like; large, kohl-smudged eyes, vermilion smeared across the forehead; long flowing wavy hair; cotton sari draping a dusky, supple, curvy body, and sleeveless blouse revealing shapely womanly arms. Flaming sensuality.
Even then however, what absolutely enthralled me was the fact that the images never really conformed to stereotypes of feminine beauty, even in semi-nude depictions. No effort was made to cover a flaw up or mask a blemish. It made me wonder about the artist's own love and appreciation for the female body, irrespective of its age or colour or proportion. It COULD NOT have been a false reflection! Secretly, I've always wondered how it might have been to be his muse, wondered how his brush might have lingered on the canvas, in portraying me as his Durga. This man was a lover first, a painter then. Someone who saw beauty and divinity in the most ordinary, even traipsing on the ugly, in its conventional understanding. To me, he emerged as the worshipper of the feminine form, resplendent even in its most repulsive repugnant manifestations. In so doing, Bikash seemed to scoff at traditional aesthetic morality, mock archetypes of the 'beautiful' and challenge popular notions of the 'desirable' female body. I am sure there have been painters before him who had deified the feminine form, even in all its gory and macabre avatars, but there was something about Bikash's paintings that seemed to supercede them all, in terms of pure visual experience. I am in any case, someone who is easily enraptured by the photographic likeness of a painting, so that Bikash's paintings reached out to me in a manner that is nothing short of esoteric. The love and longing of each careful brush-stroke showed itself on the body of the particular Durga-whether she be the urban homemaker, or the domestic help, the blind pregnant woman or the woman with a paunch, way past her prime-both in body and spirit. All desirable. All beautiful. All Durgas. All women.

The old-guards...guardian-angels

I feel like a 'somebody', a 'honu' in academia, when library-hands, instead of self-styled intellectuals -recognise me, and breed familiarity through lines like..."Ah, hello there, why didn't you come yesterday, had reserved this book/article/journal especially for you..." Oh...it makes my day. Everytime. :-)...

For these are the men who have hobnobbed with the doyens, known them when they were no more than hapless, eager wannabe's; helped them out, when they had racked their brains for a very important piece of data, or that particular, now-rare edition; spent sleepless days and nights on end sharing (and almost always, alleviating!) the frustrated agonies of writer's/researcher's blocks!

The warm tone of familiarity in their old, crackling voices therefore reassures me, just like the smell of old, crumbling, dog-eared fairy-tale books. And nestled safely in the nimbus of such a vast knowledge-sphere,a vastness unbound by 'degrees' and 'laurels', I smile to myself; for, I have a feeling, i too shall make it, i am in safe hands...make it to the list of shite-academics! And all because of unsung heroes as these...

Deflowered Wallflower...

The first time is the worst.
For anything; from heart break to the break of hymen.
And then, with no more blood to flow, no fragment tinier to break into, you become impervious...
But i guess, it doesn't show, doesn't make a noise...or why else will he go on expecting the same flow of fresh blood-red and impassioned, despite the numbness...? Prod the clot, inflict new scars, lash the whip relentlessly and lay bare the old ones, if need be...the insatiable baying for the red stench of stickiness...

Saga of delusional freaks

...I know the all-too familiar symptoms of romantic self-derision...you indulge in it and begin to imagine you owe your zest for life to someone, and then end up craving death in his/her stead...time and again, I've warned him against the trope...time and again, he has pooh-poohed me away...i just pray, when the bubble bursts, it doesnt leave him gasping for air....

de-deification

My father happened to be my first love. not an extraordinary or 'scandalous' story there, especially ever since Freud(actually Jung) made it bearable for middle-class morality by garbing it in the now-(in)famous palliative of a theory called the Electra complex.
pah! oops, did i just say pah?!?!? Freudian slip, that, even if onomatopoeic!!!
Right then...to come back to my first love-my father...i grew up loving the tall, dark and (to me) handsome person that my father was...the clothes he wore, the cigarettes he smoked, the music he listened to, the books he read-all began to shape the image of my ideal man, in my father's exact form.
Gradually,as i grew up, the image of the man of my (day) dreams began to emerge in clearer contours, coming to resemble my father in more ways than one. Naturally therefore he came to inhabit a time that i was physically not a part of. It was as if, the more i moved forward in the time-scale, the more he remained fixed in his, thereby increasing the distance between the two me's-one stuck with the man i loved somewhere in the 80's and the other moving on straight ahead.
"When i grew up, and fell in love"-i expected him to be that man-belonging to a time that i could,and did, effortlessly go back to every now and then, my haven, my refuge; in other words, the man who had it in him to be my father incarnate! Alas! he turned out to be everything my father was NOT! Absolutely NOT!!!
If my father was resolute, he was malleable; if my father was possessive, he could let go easily;if years of unsheltered student/hostel life had hardened my father into a severely opinionated individual, he was immensely impressionable as a person. What was more- he was not into Tagore AT ALL! was not into Bismillah Khan or Ritwik Ghatak. He was into a certain Syd Barrett, my father couldn't have recognised even if his life depended on it!!!
And yet, i was hopelessly in love with this man. why, i knew not then, i know not now. he knew some of the lanes i walked in my mind when i strolled down the 70's, knew some of the tram routes, could name some of the books, could recognise some of the clothes, some hairstyles, could identify some music and could relate to some, only some of the isms of that time. others he made an effort to grapple; and gave up, if he had to squint to hard.
And it was in these moments of fleeting recognition, that i began to see that he was, after all, not much removed from the man of the 80's, not much removed from my father. and yet it was precisely at that moment that i began to realise how different he WAS infact from my father...if my father was impatient,intolerant and unforgiving, he was understanding, forgiving and loved unconditionally, forgiving without questioning; if my father was resolute to the point of being ruthlessly stubborn, he was malleable to the extent of being flexible, open to individual opinion, providing room for arguments, and encouraging me, for the first time to question received wisdom. .and i did.
And as i spread my wings slowly, cautiously,to fly higher with every flap, my deity began his descent downward-much to my own shock, agony and years of denial. this man, my father, my idol, my hero, my god, was after all human, all-too human. i came to see the myopia of his vision, the narrowness of his horizons, the fixity of his beliefs and values, so that what i once worshipped as resolution to be aspired for, began to irk, irritate and then anger me as nothing more than cruel obstinacy. as the initial rush of de-deification set in however, i felt less angry with him and more compassionate; crying for hours on end thinking how i had let the old man down, how i had turned a blind eye to the circumstances, the times that had compelled him to become the hardened man he had become; for blaming him for things beyond his control, blaming him for no fault of his own. if anyone, it was i who was to blame. nobody had asked me to put him on that pedestal, deify him and infuse him with qualities that were a mere figment of my own imagination, and had perhaps nothing to do with the real man at all...
Today a much older, and none the wiser woman, i am still in love with the man of the 80's, hoping against hope that i am actually rip van winkle who will wake up to be beside the man she loves...not knowing what shape he will take...certain only of the fact that he will be no god-but rather, "just a slob like one of us"...

The Nest

I wanted always to be a good housewife-domesticated into the comfortable drone of lazy Sunday siestas in the arms of my panjabi-clad husband. Playing with the edge of his sleeves while his arms remained wrapped around my shoulders, I wanted to bring his long fingers closer to my face, to flutter my eyelashes on them, tickling him thus!

I wanted to wait in the dark of Calcutta loadsheddings with him, in our two-roomed crammed apartment in an even more crammed street of the city. Waiting-not for electricity-but for the next car to pass down the street. A passing car whose lights would cast the shadow of the window-grills on our ceiling…in which we could catch-just for a moment perhaps-our own shadows, holding hands, while lying side by side.

I wanted to wear cotton saris-the ones that get softer and softer with so many washes, colour fading so that only the black contours of the once-red or green figures remain…wanted to wear them so that I could wipe my turmeric-smeared hands on them, without feeling guilty…so that I could tuck the corner of the anchal into my waist whenever I needed to tiptoe even on a high stool to retrieve his file of papers from atop the almirah…so that when he came home from office, dejected or sullen, and wanted not to talk, but to hide his face in my chest and lie, the exquisite embroidery or the intricate designs would not intimidate him…

I wanted to have friends over; his, mine, ours; at civil hours or odd; and make my home a haven, a refuge, another home for them. I wanted to do this with him...with dim warm lights and music in the background, that nobody would listen to after the third glass of whatever alcohol that could be managed with the day's pooled-in effort!; with cigarette butts and ash strewn around lazy happy bodies, spread across my meagre whitespraed on the floor...creating a mess, that I knew I had to clear, with him offering a symapthetic, but inept hand at help! And when all would start singing drunken lullabies, or cry in remembrance of lost loves, or perhaps fall asleep, I would squeeze in, in the congested space and snuggle up to my husband, slip my arms through his, rest my head on his shoulders and smile a contended smile...

I wanted to be-if I had to “be” anything at all-a professor in college. Not so that it would earn me respect or anything, but because of its working conditions, allowing me enough time to be home. I wanted to travel by local train to and from college, and have him waiting at the Railway Bridge on most evenings, smoking while deep in thought. I wanted to pick up vegetables and grocery on the way home-together, if he seemed happy, alone, if not. Winter evenings might even see him waiting right outside my college-smoking still-to ‘pick me up’. Since we don’t have a car, we walk-with me trying to pull the shawl even more tightly around me to keep the chill of north Calcutta, a few degrees lesser than in the south, out, and him puffing the cigarette stronger…a mild cough follows..We look at each other...We smile…we continue walking…