In ancient Vedic religion and particularly in the Advaita tradition governed by the Upanisads (for a quick review of what these texts are, read here), there is an individuated relationship between the individual person who is the host for a soul and the supreme energy or force. I wish to interrupt here the collective dimensions of the perception of religion in India legal theory on religion. The ERP debate in Indian constitutional jurisprudence completely imagines a religious person to be bound by the powers of the communitarian authority that monitors her religious conduct. This jurisprudence is impoverished insofar as it doesn’t imagine an independent relationship between the divine and the devotee, unmediated by religious authority and/or scripture. While Patrick Olivelle in Upanisads (OUP, 1996) lays out the structure of the primary Upanisads as revealing a secret cosmology which calls out to a person to ask questions of the cosmos. The person who asks such a question about the nature of the universe was already being summoned by the cosmic forces to come into this corpus of knowledge. I quote Olivelle (1996, liii):

It is, however, assumed that such connections are always hidden. We see the term used with the meaning in the Upanisads themselves, for example, at CU (Cadogya Upanisad) 1.1.10 and 1.13.4. Because of the hidden nature of these connections, the term upanisadalso came to mean a secret, especially, secret knowledge or doctrine.

There are, in this mysterious corpus of knowledge, few roles to be played by mediators, authorities in such inquiry. The oral or written scriptures, the revealed words and their sonic force do some work, yes. But the inquiry itself doesn’t require a communitarian authority saying do this; don’t do that. A person’s relationship with gods, ancestors, elements and spirits, energies and forces and the cosmos is essential religion. A range of rituals and practices grow out of these principles of being which then translate into concrete actions in everyday life. The ERP debate reduces religion to its quotidian concrete expressions without relating these practices and rituals (whether dictated by communitarian authority or not) to their original principles of thought. In other words, it oversocialises religion which according to ancient Vedic textual corpuses, is only a fraction of what religion is and is meant to accomplish in its cultivation.

Let me end with a Sankarcarya hymn that I tried to repeat in my voice.

A few lines of Bangla verse came recently, tried to translate it here:

Sun comes in through the gap of the window

it rains and it rains

buses trams have stopped coming here

moss makes a home at the base of trees.

In the sun, I bury myself in the pillow

You write reams of paper

and I sell these in total to the kabaadiwala.

The sun write poems on leaves

- I know that; the rains write poems on my palm

- I know that; you write poems out of sad cheeks

- I know that.

I leave you with some kind of a montage here.

Either you take to strings or keys or drumbeats, usually only one genre of sound will take root in one soul - a kind of musical monogamy. I was in love with the tease of the string. Two years of the piano as an early teen were difficult. Primarily because I was restless and lacked discipline. In 2016, when I bought the violin, and looked at sheets of squiggles after a gap of twenty or so years, it was self-evident that the major scale of C had no sharp or flat, G had an F sharp, D had a C and an F sharp. The sheet meant music, the squiggles started making sound in my head. My partner and I often talk about how he experiences music in words, and I do in sound. What is it about MS Subbulaxmi that strikes you if not the words? - he asked. I have a hard time remembering words of songs and poems. He knows that. I tried to articulate that it is the pekhawaj (or is it mardala) pounding in my head. But I couldn’t explain what pounding in my head actually means. Language falls short. MS has a scratchy, double bass type of voice. It’s sound all the way, I said, but it didn’t quite make sense as I spoke the words.

This is the reason I can now admit that I hate rock music. The overdependence on the Spanish Guitar or the Electric Guitar, seems to me a huge musical mistake, like an overly made up face. Strings have a language of their own. Strings must talk to each other in that language. My favourite scale is the D minor (with a B flat). You play it mechanically saying that this is the scale the composer wanted. But the composer actually wanted you to get inside his melancholia, walk through the inside of his heart - the B flat is the key signature through which you and he exchange compassion/mutuality. The D minor talks to you only after you’ve played the B flat correctly, and you sigh from the weight of that sound. Again, language falls short.

What is it about a high C sharp or an oddly low B flat that lends itself to our internal melancholia. The sitar probably will rule this string kingdom of my heart. But I believe it is a benevolent, democratic type ruler, making space for others, with obviously an uncomfortable coexistence with the double bass.

To invite you into string sonic universes, let me share Ravi Shankar’s music for Pather Panchali as also the double bass making sound with Ravel’s Bolero.

I am writing something with a friend on epics and their resilient presence in modern times. My friend drew the parallel between epic heroes and the internal rigmarole of James Joyce's Leopold Bloom. And I thought of the whole series - of the lonesome men of Jon Fosse's Melancholia, that of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Teju Cole's Open City and so on. Various iterations of brooding men in Dostoevsky novels. Men who are down and out. Men who don't give a _________. Men who have nothing to lose. Men who are willing to try out different dangers. One man's contradictory relationship with himself and his oscillation between alignment with the ideal and the real has been the obsession of storytellers since time immemorial. This is strange to me. Not strange that men are lonesome. But that good stories can only be told with them as the centrepieces.

Why are women's stories not as much fun? Are we lacking as fulcrums of the living? Are our stories only going to be about garden parties and rich, young men? Is a woman never going to manage the rough waters of the sea on a paltry ship? Epic women are conniving and clever and controlling, and yes, have what we might call agency. But they stay locked up in castles; they never go to war or are stranded at sea. When will open skies feature a soaring bird that might actually be a woman?

Homer has been deviated from, the agency of gods has been denied, IMAX and liberalism have allegedly made a potboiler Hollywood drama out of Homer’s sacred, man-god-nature driven epic. Nolan puts on display a seamlessly frightening spectacle - that diminutes Odysseus and his primary guilt trip - that of the sea. I find myself writing these days, unrelatedly, about the relations between people and things, subjects and objects. The sea arises out of this vocabulary of subject-object, person-thing, nature-culture, into a sovereign. Poseidon is offended, he brings his spectacular revenge to the maritime fate of Odysseus and his men. But let’s forget for a moment the embodiment of Cyclops, Scylla, and Charybdis in Nolan’s film. There is a distinct, divine currency running through the physical world that translates into particular human fates. This energy is not inert, it has intentions and emotions. Its rage can generate havoc, and humans live at its pleasure and mercy.

Claude Levi-Strauss, in Tristes Tropiques, writes about watching the cadences and shades of the sea while in voyage from West Africa to Brazil. Something about not seeing boundaries is reflective in the human penchant for various kinds of sea-minded sickness. One yearns for boundaries of land; the vast expanse of the sea while on ship offers none. The skies and the sea merge into a macabre dance ensemble. Odysseus reads the oceanic signals wrong; he is assailed by seastorms and hostile winds. Odysseus is not a matter of much worry in the film, as the audience is forced to watch and immerse in the majesty of the sea. This sea is laden with dangerous emotions - its wrath has to be avoided at all cost. I felt, coming out of the theatre, that the wrath of the sea was the only real thing. We are mistaken to watch Nolan’s Odyssey as a tale of a man. It is a tale of the majestic, divinely laden ocean that shows very simply the insignificance of a great man. Nolan spoke in a recent interview about the cosmopolitanism of Zeus’s law - the ethic of stranger tolerance - and its relevance in the modern world. I’d say, rather, that his film shows emphatically, in the age of climate terror, the absolute insignificance of man-made greatness.

Not a morning song, not the most appropriate song for the making of notes on Etienne Balibar and national borders. But right there, Toni Braxton, saying in her signature bass voice: Un Break my Heart, say you love me again. Toni Braxton came to me as a 90s Greatest Hits cassette, possibly in 1996 or 1997.The years of Pokhran Nuclear Tests, and the Booker for Arundhati Roy. The years immediately preceding Whigfield and the Spice Girls, and possibly, Aqua. All of which paled in the face of Toni Braxton. Braxton was an Amy Winehouse, before it was actually a thing. A achingly low voice of a woman saying: Un-break my heart, say you love me again. Never have the words of heartache been so sweet.

It should be against the law for music provider algorithms to play Toni Braxton at 5.30 in the morning. My headphones turned illegal with nostalgia for the days of Braxton's pleasurable exaltation towards heartaches of the 90s. The 90s were a time of pleasurable heartaches. Something tells me the second half of the 2020s are going to bring pleasurable heartaches again. Millions of young folk on the streets, mocking sovereign hubris, dancing, singing, celebating a nation that is much bigger than the size of political dispensations - maybe the GenZ hopewalas are out to mend our millenial hearts that broke slowly through the 2000s, beginning in 1992/93. The business of mending broken hearts was something 90s music took very seriously. There was no shame in admitting to the million pieces which mirrored a once-heart. Maybe, we, as 90s kids, are entering that era again - time of our childhood and adolscence. A time of innocence, a time of confidences.

Growing up, we used to look at the champion swimmers, in my school, lash about in waters with beauty, confidence, and elan. I am not there yet, and perhaps, never will be. But the thrill of lashing about in waters is something I am slowly getting used to. The thrill of bringing your legs together and thashing downward into the water, displacing as much as you can with your bare stength of lower body, cannot be denied. The thril of the lunging upper body is yet to descend on me.

They say that learning new things at a late age opens up neural pathways in your brain. I hope there are new pathways of electric circuitry in my brain. But in the water, I am certain I am a different body. A more bodily persona than I am when standing on ground. The ground is a safe space, it packs up the body into a tight little vertically arranged compartment. The water opens the body, muscles dance, the lower body discovers hidden powers, the upper body - well, I don't know yet.

The internet says that the butterfly is a remarkably difficult stroke to swim. That may be so - like most beautifully diffcult things, it makes one's attempts, even failed ones, an experience of pleasure.

But man, proud man,
Dress'd in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd—
His glassy essence—like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.

Are we all angry apes now? Smarting away under the impact of the most recent insult. G K Gandhi spoke passingly of M K Gandhi who would’ve reminded his followers to correct the violence within, before reaching out in angry self-righteousness about the violences without. Our every act of public criticism/outrage/angry-ape-troll-voice today is subject to that advice. I am teaching an introductory course on religion this term. We began with Book Eleven - the penultimate Parva of the Clay Sanskrit Library translation of the Vyasa Mahabharata - known as the Stri Parva. The royal women are hysterically weeping as their pearl necklaces come off. Across the battlefield, there are corpses of men - royal warriors, men of glory, men of great knowledge and power. Dressed in the trappings of ‘ a little brief authority’. The dresses are now torn, the limbs decapitated, lying around. Ultimately, the most glorious man is food for vultures.

The battle glories may be memorialised in a public mausoleum. Battle glories may lead to ballad poems and songs. But the bearer of such glory is but a precarious trace in everyday action and language. Our hubris is returned to the earth as words etched along a wave of dust. There is a meditation on the aging shadow of the Lenin statue in the Moscow essay by Walter Benjamin, republished years later, in English in the 1986 collection Reflections. Lenin, now enshrined in a statue, remains a lengthening shadow surrounding people’s everyday struggles in late socialist or postsocialist Russia. Lenin’s glory amounts ultimately to a few words of loyalty to a regime.

There are no ways of pointing out angry apes except for the ones inside us. We are dressed in a little brief authority which excites our ego, ever so briefly, ever so exhilaratingly. We feel important, especially in denying others’ pride. We ride over the importance of others all the while asserting our own glory. We may not have a lengthening shadow over the fading memory of a regime. We may not even have a plaque or trophy to decorate our fallen-ness. We may overtly and covertly become the angry apes smarting under little violences of others. We may never contemplate that the enemy without is a mirror of the enemy within.

To remember M K Gandhi, the mandate of constructive action was always to be wedded with non-cooperation and civil disbedience. It may have been as intimate and private as the cleaning of toilets and weaving of cloth on the charkha, but it showed us ways of keeping oneself from not fully riding the glorious wave of angry objection.

Recently, I watched in extreme excitement the felling of a wing of our old academic block at the university, which is being redeveloped. There is reason for nostalgia, yes, it was a zone of much activity and importance. But nostalgia is emotional low hanging fruit. Like the felling of a tree. The JCB earthmovers were waiting in line to pick up the debris. Physical debris - bearing the traces of lives and worlds now gone. Like kites feeding on carcasses at a meat market. Perfect bodies, now returned to the elements of nature. Nourishment for birds, insects, and the earth.

I watch the two-day lives of hibiscus flowers on my verandah. They bloom in glory, they shrivel, they fold up, they fall dead onto the soil, they return to the earth. It all takes forty eight hours - this total drama. The tall buildings, the bodies of kings and warriors, all ultimately forgotten. That is the nature of history - forcibly recorded, naturally forgotten. Laughably insignifcant, everything and everyone. Like my unsaved, beautiful post. I wrote it, I read it. There is no record of it. Metabolised, with no record other than my precarious memory.

In the summers of Calcutta in the late 80s, my brother and I would be taken to the Calcutta lakes to a neighbourhood swimming club for lessons. He was two, and I was six. He took to the waters much quicker than me. It was a crowded pool of kids in the summer camp; they dropped us in a cordoned area of the lakes by the time we had learnt to (basically) float in the water. There were creepers and creatures in the lake waters, but we managed to makeit across the waters by distances of about 18-20 metres. I didn’t learn much technique, but evolved a reasonably good relationship with water.

Over the next few decades, water faded from my life. I swam a bit in the Bangalore club pool in the 2000s in my early twenties, and a few times (while I was in graduate school in the US) in the 50 metre Olympic pool in the Cathedral-turned-into-gym at the university. I figured very soon that the rigour and fitness that the 50 metre swim routine required was way beyond my physical capacity.

Cut to 2025: my psychiatrist’s constant reminder that exercise is manna for mental health and the burdgeoning workload led me back into the swimming pool. I had lost the intimacy with water. I don’t have the confidence to swim in a lake or an Olympic pool anymore. A 20 or 25 metre pool, preferably with lanes, is good enough for me. A coach-driven swim camp in Bangalore came to my rescue. I started swimming last winter at the heated pool of the Catholic Club. My only talent in things I begin to learn from scratch is that failure doesn’t bother me. I show up. And I sort of like it when I fail. It’s a motivation builder. I showed up for a month or two and the coach basically taught me free style and back stroke from scratch. Technique, breathing, balance were all wrong.

Cut to April 2026: the worklife bringing higher stress levels, began to drive me now to the swim routine more than ever before. Unlike writing, where it is always traumatic to write, and always lovely to have written, swimming is joyful in its conduct -stretching into the waters, slowly turning left and right slightly just before one breathes, the four-arm action where you breathe every fourth stroke, the bilateral-breathing freestyle where you breathe on both sides equally. I have done the mushroom flip only once, with the coach’s supervision. That was scary - won’t have the gumption to try it again very soon. My breast stroke is getting better though I am not breathing long enough and fully, as I should. Works in progress, all. I generally swim in a 20 metre pool, and I now manage an average of 32 laps in 40 minutes, with the help of strategic egging on by the coach, who thinks a day of 24 laps is a poor-performance day. Tough love from coaches is the best thing obviously.

I now understand the exact dimensions of my psychiatrist’s reminder to me for over five years that exercise is manna for mental health. The aching body parts and better sleep regimens that follow make the aquatic life the perfect antidote for the troubled mind.

Two things struck me as strange about these moments: 1) no one took photos of the boys. Surely, they too had vanity and wanted to be shot with the fading sun on their faces. Young women were shot by young men or other young women. A certain kind of young woman and her heightened sunset-filtered beauty was the object of affection - not the sun, not the others, not the food, nothing else. Why do men not want records, moment for moment, frame for frame, of their physical beauty? I wondered. My partner said, this is routine young-person phenomena in the West as well. I kept thinking about the patience of the photographers who were decidedly not part of the story, not as participants, not as chroniclers.

Or, so I perceived the situation, as my partner and I, in our older-generation fascination for urban photography tried to disrupt the pristine sunset with chairs and decks, bobbing headscarfed heads, and other people’s cameras. This was where our vanity lay: we wanted to frame some version of perfect clutter, perfect ugliness, urban ennui, balance of light and shadow, filtered through the sunset.

The other curious thing that crept up was: 2) the sun had no role to play in this shenanigan. The mighty west-leaning sun of East Asia was diminuted to a mere prop in the photographic escapade. It declined from being the fascinating subject of JMW Turner or Claude Monet or Childe Hassam, to being the appropriate convenience of new-age visual obsession.

I am trying not to write this in sadness, and without sounding like my older-generation photographic escapades are not as vain, and are in some strange way, superior. I am trying, yes. But failing. The mirror, as Lacan had said early on, gives a distorted image of one’s self to the child who looks first at the mirror and finds in it, a story that is not his/her own. The maladjustment between the mirror-image and the authentic sense of self is a chasm that spans one’s whole biography. It is, perhaps, the only story that biographical detail can tell.

Why do young women not want to be free of the mirror in the face of a perfect sunset?

I was painfully thin, and marked the lack of physical mass with a load of self. Today, a friend and I are chatting on WA about the various girlie trips from our twenties, and she links to a Google Photos folder. Out from it flows our palpable double-youth. We were so young. It was August 2009. Two girls and cocktails in Penang, Malaysia. The first thing that strikes me about this is the embarrassing fluidity of youth. I quickly download these onto my Dropbox to retain the assurance of my now-gone youth, is the skinniness. Both girls, aged 26, are reed thin. I wear a bandana. We drink fruity cocktails. Swimsuits and summer dresses. Sunsets and aviators. Digital cameras recorded the sheer power of our youthful invincibility and our hearts full of expectation.

All these things feature like a momentary, terrifying fire, waiting to quietly take a backseat, as the heap of ash that is time, slowly declares its final triumph. Time is the making of debris. Memory frames only the traces of such brief flames - the fire that once erupted across the horizon. The desire, the confidence, the vanity, the invincibility, the self-obsession, the cocksureness. These photos erupt onto my computer like wildfire.

This is a self that I don’t particularly want to remember. It’s a body I wouldn’t mind having again, but not at the price of that youthful cocksureness. Twentysix was a time of much eruption. I had started reading the first pages of Walter Benjamin and some of the big poets - T S Eliot, maybe AKR. I could write okay; I was too busy being cool to invest in it with humility and discipline. The big books along with the Bass Library carousels in New Haven had begun to call out quietly. The cocksure youth was slowly beginning to waver.

It inaugurated the time for midnight lamps.

I don’t remember 2009 often, but when I do, I feel a bit sorry that for that reed-thin girl who thought photographs were everything.

These places included Iran, Nepal, Theroux on a train, Turner’s Zambia, and ended with the theme of return/home - back to base point. In this last section of the course, we read from Roberto Bolano’s short story collection Return - a story titled ‘Snow ‘-that showed the troubled interiority of a young Chilean man who lives (and routinely gets into trouble) in the wild world of Russian mafia, and sometimes dreams of going back. The main provocation behind the seminar was: all external travel is at best a manifestation of or fed by internal travel. We ended with Anne Carson’s famous prosepoem/essay ‘The Glass Essay’ (first published in 1995) from the collection Glass, Irony, God.

I was most struck by the recurrence of kitchen doors and windows as instruments that channelled a desperate interior manifesting into slices of the poet’s exterior environment. A lost boyfriend, an irritable mother, a father from WWII veternhood who is steadily losing his bearings, and cold, cold Canada decorated this essay. Emily Bronte of Wuthering Heights (1847) fame was at the centre of the poem/essay. There are references to wind, moors, darkness, snow, cliffs, forests, - all familiar devices of Wuthering Heights and works of its time. There is a clothesline - but there are no clotheslines in the Canada of today, I say in class. There are clotheslines though in the nineteenth century rural England. Two centuries, separated by a common neighbour -the long 20th c., holler across to each other. Each mishears and misunderstands the other. Perhaps, that is the nature of communication between two entities. It enhances the chasm between them and fills it with the endless gurgling of language. The only winner in that lose-lose exercise is, perhaps, language. That which claims greatness in performing the song-and-dance of graffiti, all the while claiming to fill out the vacantness of being. We ended in a return to things like kitchen doors and windows, that do not catch our fancy, but sustain us, day on day, when fancy is unavailable.

[Moments from my slidedeck on Anne Carson. Copyright: Atreyee Majumder, 2026.]

I see the India-concept as a semiotic spread that encompasses all the components of a family of images that lend a number of sensible extensions to the fantasmata (phantasm/spectre) that is India. Bollywood films – Rang De Basanti (Rakeysh Mehra, 2006) or Peepli Live (Aunsha Rizvi, 2010) or the more recent film Axone (Nicholas Kharkongor, 2018) provide a direct visual and symbolic canvas for the production, circulation, and consumption of the India-concept. There is the India which is the home for any poor and hapless peoples, endlessly in the waiting-room-of modernity; the India that believes in the Idea of India as solidarity, friendship, and sacrifice that straddles social barriers of language, ethnicity, caste, religion and so on; and finally the India that we imagine with the aid of mediascapes but can’t quite understand – the jungles of central India where far-left radical groups are operational or the difficult terrain of the Northeast regions where people don’t speak the dominant mainland Indian languages or practice cultures that are legible in the mainland. We know this family of images, even if some of it is familiar and the rest alien. These are extensions and disruptions of the dominant sign-system that generally sustain this concept.

On the one hand, this extended semiotic field lends itself to the legal commonsense arising out of public discourse about the Constitution and other legal documents. The word azadi is another example of this extension of India as an amorphous, ever-expanding semiotic field, or the evocation of the figure Mother India or Bharatmata (conceived visually in the iconic Nargis poster in the 1957 film Mother India, or in famous paintings ranging from artworks of Abanindranath Tagore to M F Hussain). On the other end of the political spectrum, I notice the amplification of Hindu right-wing signage spreading across the symbolic horizons of everyday urban life, with particular impressions of the Hindu god Hanuman in a strong masculine expression and musculature, stamped on the back windows on cars, motorcycles, and auto-rickshaws. This too is an extension of the semiotic field through which an India is conjured and sustained albeit in a different ideological direction. It is pertinent to draw support from the scholarship in visual studies among others, from Christopher Pinney (Pinney 2003; Pinney 1997) and Kajri Jain (Jain 2007; Jain 2021) who offer accounts of the visual/semiotic field of India through which several ideas of India thrive, circulate, and survive.

Concomitantly, I am reminded of the various signifying strategies for early Independence India and its trials and tribulations in Shyam Benegal’s films like Mandi and Nishant – the stylised Hindi spoken by rural characters somewhere in south India (presumably, in modern Telangana or Andhra Pradesh) – where the odd rurality of boulders and barren open lands violently interrupts the mental image of the Gangetic Doab that feeds the idea of the Indian rural, replete with paddy fields and riparian beauty. In the film Trikaal (1985), auteur filmmaker of the Indian New Wave, Shyam Benegal portrays pre-succession Goa in which India appears as a daunting, culturally alien aggressor for the Indo-Portuguese elites who are looking for the first opportunity to run away to Portugal. This too, is a family of images that support a version of the India-concept. This rather vast and ever-stretching expanse of shapes, textures, and hues that support diverse versions of the Idea of India is the key organizing principle of this volume of writings at the limit of the idea of India. The India-concept takes material shape through such a chaotic family of images or imagetexts. Indians of varying description access the India-concept with such family or families as props.

I wrote a poem last year called adbhoota. It has danced around many literary magazine submission queues, and has been consistently rejected. It has, I figure now, too many obscure references. The most obvious one being, if you’re into Indian things, the adbhoota rasa - the mood/affect of the grotesque. I chose not to footnote the obvious reference to the grid of nine rasas anywhere. This is a problem. I don’t footnote enough. These conceptual translations become grotesque little shadows dancing over the words that I choose with love.

Choosing the contemporaneous as a way of life is difficult for me. Choosing the contemporaneous as a canvas of literary expression is a greater difficulty. If the now exists as a coordinate of the ‘these days’ or the ‘contemporary’, then it must be, at least - so I hope, possible to stretch the contours of the ‘now’ to mean debris and traces of breaths taken long ago, that make possible a brief, elusive, fleeting ‘now’. yet another trace in the junkyard of being. In this conception of now, the literacy of the nine rasas can be assumed comfortably. It means that others’ sighs, heaved in immemorial time, are a part of the backdrop in which my ‘now’ is constructed. Modernist poets do this often. I don’t think of Tagore (whose birthday passed this weekend) as a modernist poet necessarily. But the poem Bashi (The Flute) was sent to me a few years ago without the poet being mentioned. I was confident that it had to be Jibonanondo Das. I will choose not to provide a cosmopolitan translation of the difference between the two poets and their stylistic preferences here.

Tagore creates the escape route of a claustrophobic ‘now’ through the notes played on a cornet which ring across the horizon, providing a radically altered timespace to the claustrophobia of a narrow alleyway and a damp little room in mid-20th-century Calcutta.

I tried to translate a few lines from it. May we all find adequate and appropriate escape routes.

A note or two arise

out of the stench of this alleyway

in the dead of the night

in the early hours of the morning

at times, at twilight

amid the play of light and shadow.

Suddenly, in the evening,

a note awakens out of the Sindh

ringing out into the horizon

the sound of timeless yearning.

The Mathura Museum houses a massive (maybe in the ball park of seven feet) statue of Kanishka - headless - from the first century CE which stands tall just as one enters. There are many Buddhas, some faceless, some Bodhisattvas, horizontally aligned Vishnus, a few Shivas. They co-exist on a summer afternoon in imperfect harmony. Comforted by dim lighting and murmuring schoolkids who come to visit with their teacher.

The major part of the crowds throngs the Krishnajanmabhoomi shaped by gun-toting security guards, and many restrictions. The Dwarkadheesh temple and the ghats occupy the place of close second and third in the crowds’ attention. The Mathura Museum fades into oblivion. We forget that the region, other than being the sacred geography of Krishna worship, is also the largest and perhaps, the oldest archaeological dig zone in northern India.

The headless Kanishka towers over me, encased in a glass case that collects dust and melancholy over decades. The warlike figure has a massive sword hanging casually against the waist. The museum does not have a catalogue. The museum personnel are quiet, friendly, and listless. It is often very hot on the occasions that I show up. Usually, with a visiting friend for company. Temples are overwhelming, crowded, noisy, and demand a full-body submission. But this is a sacred geography too. It demands only that you look up at the cost of stretching your neck, to stare at the headless Kanishka. The headless Buddha has a radically different aura. It speaks a vocabulary that I am yet to decode. I am reminded of the massive Abu Simbel statues - also noseless - in Aswan, Egypt, or the Bamiyan Buddhas (now destroyed by the Taliban) in Afghanistan that the internet throws up occasionally. Largeness is awe-inspiring, yes. But nothing like the melancholia of broken things, especially, from more than a thousand years. They talk, quietly, in their unforgettable steadiness. The dust on glass cases seems flimsy. But the noselessness of massive things remind me these too are dust. Waiting to tell the stories of violent kings who have now all gone to dust.

Everything changes. The Buddha taught the world. And yet, we worry needlessly over telling a continuous story of ourselves, all in the service of a fleeting ego. That which burns like a flame, leaving behind ashen remains.

In the opening lines of Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss writes:

TRAVEL and travellers are two things I loathe and 
yet here I am, all set to tell the story of my expeditions. But at least I ve 
taken a long while to make up my mind to it: fifteen years have passed 
since I left Brazil for the last time and often, during those years, I ve 
planned to write this book, but I ve always been held back by a sort of 
shame and disgust. So much would have to be said that has no possible 
interest: insipid details, incidents of no significance.

There are other more mundane translations from French into English, of these lines. But I chose this version because the use of the words ‘loathe' and ‘insipid' generate a violent and dramatic reaction on the reader and create a pleasurable experience of reading. Writers are only too aware of how this routine drama of words is and can be generated. Even their so-called restraint and choice of sparseness is geared towards the generation of diverse textures of such drama.

In the writerly world, there is some popularly doled out wisdom that one must have ‘experience' of myriad kinds to be able to write in a effective manner. One has to see a war, taste an aphrodysiac, climb a mountain, have their hearts broken, in order to write. I wonder about this wisdom, while seeking solace in the stillness of some writers who couldn't or chose not to go anywhere far away or do dramatic, eventful things. What kind of writing does humdrum (breakfast to dinner aiding the measurement of life pacing towards death) produce?

I have written earlier about the difficulty of writing sound, and even earlier about the drama of light and shadows. There is obvious drama in these choices. These days, I am trying to see if tiredness and the general exhaustion of life can lead to writing. This tiredness makes me a boring conversationalist, but perhaps, I can effectively channel it into some Substack writing.

Is tiredness an intensity? I ask

But the question remains, at least for me, where do poems come from? Where and when does language exceed its own terrifying bureaucracy? Here is an attempt - an application - if you like, to the Ministry of Poems. Hoping this beseeching will lead to some poems.

Accident

If at all we meet on the corridor of reason

it is by accident.

An accident that changes the morning’s shape

It converts reason into a kaleidoscope

shapeshifting

isosceles triangles

staying in one place

and yet not staying

for no one must stay.

I try to catch a glimpse of you

on the corridor of reason.

Pundits are talking talking

I bring out my shadowcatcher

by now, you have left.

It is too late.

At dusk, there are no poems

Only the sigh of cowdust.

There are new age versions of the radio today (mostly meant for older people). But it was a fixture in the eighties middle-class household in Calcutta. We did not know the pleasures of extreme visuality. Sensuality was delivered in small quantities of hushed nightly commentary - and in Asha’s sensuous notes, in Rafi’s aches, in Kishore’s mirth. There were no visuals aside from a black and white TV and the real world. Perhaps, we learnt to imagine a bit better.

At age fourteen, I won a prize at some FM contest on the radio. By now, we had a sound system (a Videocon stereo) that I could exercise some autonomy over. My tastes in music were now totally dictated cool folk in school. I submitted to this sonic regime of Dire Straits and Pink Floyd and called it ‘my personal freedom’. I used this freedom to record relevant songs live from the FM channel onto a blank cassette. It was the era of mixed tapes - the ancient love language.

In the late nineties, with the arrival of MTV and the music video genre, the visual immediacy of music entered our worlds. Someone had to dance for us to listen to a song. I bought a number of indie music stuff including the Colonial Cousins, Asha and Leslie Lewis, Alisha Chinai, Shaan, some forgettable Bangla rock. I forget the others now. It was a long time ago and perhaps, not worth remembering in such detail now. The remix economy had descended upon us along with the promise of foreign-made cars. My parents by now had a longish sedan car. It made me happy on the occasions that the car drew up to pick me up after debate or theatre practice at school.

The whole story began with the aches and pains of Asha singing in the night radio next to my grandmother’s pillow. Two elderly women with a sprightly beat in their hearts. Goodbye Asha!