The Magic that is India

The well-known and much-loved author, Ruskin Bond, was born in India of English parents. In 1952, he went to England at the age of 18 to find his feet as a writer. For a couple of years, he struggled in Jersey and London, working as a clerk by day and toiling to become a novelist in his free hours. A publisher accepted his first novel The Room on the Roof for consideration, but took ages to decide. Nothing seemed working. That, together with a failed relationship with a Vietnamese girl Vu Phuong convinced young Ruskin Bond he was a failure.  

He describes the situation in his autobiography, Lone Fox Dancing:

For some time I had almost resigned myself to a lifetime of clerical servitude–it  would have been bearable had there been someone, a Vu Phuong, to take my hand occasionally–but now, once more, I began to think seriously of returning to India; although, when I mentioned this  to  anyone–Indian  students, my mother, or friends back in India, they expressed alarm at the thought and did their best to dissuade me. What was the point in coming all the way to England if I was going to return home because I felt lonely and because I thought I was a failure?  

'Home'–that was the magnet. Not the 'home' of my mother and stepfather, but the larger home that was India, where I could even feel free to be a failure. The Land of Regrets, someone had called India; but for me it was a land of acceptances. For hadn't I, a mixed-up colonial castaway, an accident of history, found acceptance on the streets and in the tea-shops and the wayside haunts of Dehra? I wasn't looking for a palace or a hilltop retreat. All I really wanted was my little room back again.

The magic of the larger home that is India! The land of acceptances where you are free to be a failure. A country that shelters people irrespective of the colour of their skin, irrespective of the god they pray to, irrespective of their station in life. It’s a unique country where bazaars, wayside tea shops, and people’s hearts are open for everyone.

That is the essence of India.

Let’s keep it alive.

26 February 2019

Bhai phonta

It is always nice to return to Kolkata. It’s nicer if the month is November. The weather is magical during the four months of winter here. The clear blue sky and the mild chill in the air … Plus, friends and close relations who are parts of oneself.

Last night, we went to my sister’s home for a family festival called bhai phonta. In Bangla, bhai means brother and phonta means dot. However, my attempts to translate the phrase into English produces a rather ridiculous string of words, every time. So, I would just try to describe what this function is all about. (I am sure many of you can produce a lovely translation of bhai-phonta in English. Please share it with me. I will be happy to steal your words.)

In the function, the sister puts a tilak on her brothers’ forehead and chants a short mantra to ward off evils lurking for them in dark alleys and other such perilous places. The precise mantra varies depending on what district of Bengal the family originally came from, but these six lines – I believe – are common to all. These are also the most touching lines I have ever heard, and have been fortunate to hear almost every year since I was little.

স্বর্গে হুলুস্থুল, মর্ত্যে জোকার
না যাইও ভাই যম দুয়ার।
যম দুয়ারে দিয়ে কাঁটা
বোনে দেয় ভাইরে ফোঁটা।
যমুনায় দেয় যমরে ফোঁটা
আমি দেই আমার ভাইরে ফোঁটা।

There’s great commotion in heaven
And through the world ululations spread.
Please brother, never go to the land of the dead.
I bar your entry to the Kingdom of Yama.
Saying this, I put a dot on your forehead.
Yamuna puts a dot on Yama’s forehead,
And I put one on my brother’s

Yama, as you know, is the king of the world below, where everyone of us has to go for their records to be checked by a chap called Chitragupta, who is endowed with infinite memory, or as our Hindu revivalist friends would love to claim, the first super computer. Anyway, once your records are put before him, Yama takes a call on whether you could move on to heaven, or serve your time in the nether land, being deep-fried in a cauldron for 5000 years, or hung upside down in company of poisonous snakes or ….

Yesterday my sister barred my entry to court of Yama. But what takes the cake is invoking Yama’s sister, Yamuna, in this highly optimistic business. Linguists tell us that that is how the term “emotional blackmail” originated.

Sorry about the digression. My sister and every other sister chants the mantra three times and with her ring finger, puts a dot with sandalwood paste on her sibling’s forehead. Curiously, she uses her left hand for younger bros, and the right for older ones.

Bhai phonta is different from rakhi of North India as it puts women on stronger ground. While in rakhi, the sister ties a rakhi on the forearm of the brother to renew a bond that will protect her, in bhai phonta, she is in the driver’s seat. It is she who takes on the responsibility of protecting her bros, although not directly, but by invoking the good offices of supernatural powers.

Before I wrap up, a significant difference between English and our Indian languages is that our languages don’t have a word for “cousin”. For us, cousins are not gender-neutral; they are either sisters or brothers. Last night, my sister invited, besides me, the only other male cousin of hers who is in town.

As I write this, I recall my sisters who I might not meet for years, but who I am sure – given a chance – would stop me from getting into the Kingdom of Yama.

Keep well, dear sisters, all of you.

10 Nov 2018

Fragments of an Unbroken Mirror: I. It’s Yesterday Once Again

In my solitude, I have clearly seen things that are not real.  – Antonio Machado

The nature of my work being what it is, I didn’t see the setting sun for quite some time. Until today.

This afternoon, when I left my workplace, the bloodless winter sun was hanging near the horizon behind a veil of fog and dust.  On the other side of the road, boys were playing cricket in the big park that’s called Park Circus Maidan. Dust kicked up by cricketers hung like an ochre blanket over the field, around which elderly trees stood like disinterested spectators. The trees, many of them barren, and all of them heavy with undisturbed dust of many rainless months, were desperately waiting for a shower.  

For some reasons, there were just a few people on the pavements and hardly any vehicles on the carriageway. The men with broken cheeks in shabby shirts and short dhotis selling bhelpuris and pani puris at the park entrance had no customers. … Although the city has changed inexorably over the past fifty years, neither the taste of pani puris, nor the look of the men who sell them has changed. 

My friend Jyoti lived near the Park Circus Maidan when we were in school. Jyoti and I spent many afternoons in this park, chatting and eyeing up girls, me smoking a secret cigarette and Jyoti – he had all the makings of the teetotaller he is today – looking at me disapprovingly. 

Today, a relentless winter breeze has been blowing since morning. A mild shiver passes through my spine as I wait at the bus stop.  Suddenly, I am gripped by a mildly intoxicating fear. The place is far too quiet, far too empty, it feels almost surreal.  And the city looks different in the magical yellow light of the setting sun. I stand flabbergasted on the eerily quiet road and try to figure out what has been happening. 

It is perhaps the perfect setting for a double-decker bus to arrive … the red Leyland double-decker with the proud head of a Royal Bengal tiger stencilled on its side … the double-decker that has been discarded long ago by administrators who has no sense of urban poetry … the double-decker without which the story of my childhood, which I am going to tell you in a moment, would be incomplete. 

And it must have been a special day for me, or the world. The front seats on the upper deck of the bus are unoccupied … I recall, there was a time when I would exchange anything for a front seat which allowed me a panoramic view of the road ahead. 

As our bus moves along, as buildings, trees, and lamp posts march backward, the roads become emptier and the evening light mellower. The two men who were arguing noisily behind me fall silent. 

A translucent canopy of stillness hangs over the world as we go along familiar roads past familiar structures like the new shopping mall on Amir Ali Avenue, the perpetually grey façade of the Modern High School, Calcutta Cricket and Football Club, and along familiar flyovers.  Yet, the sparse pedestrians seem far away and the place looks different from the humdrum metropolis I saw just hours earlier. It seems unreal, more like a faded sepia picture stuck with corner hinges in a photo album with thick black pages, an album that had been lost long ago. 

The bus goes on a journey more in time than space. The Kolkata of the twenty-first century fades away from before my believing eyes and a similar but very different conurbation from a different millennium takes its place.


It’s yesterday once again.

[This is the first chapter of my memoir Fragments of an Unbroken Mirror, which I dream will become a much-loved book.]

Let ME TOO speak out!

Over the last few days, women victims in India have been breaking down the Chinese Wall of shame and coming out against sexual assaults. We always knew there were sexual predators everywhere, including at workplaces, but the extent of the evil, now that it’s being spoken about, is more than horrifying.

It would be safe to think that for every woman who has chosen to go public with her protest, there are many more who haven’t. So far in India, women have come out only from two fields: the entertainment industry and the media. It would be laughable to think that men in other professions would be any better. So, what we see now is the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

It is deeply disturbing. I salute the women who have come out. They deserve immense respect because they must be going through intense pain while reliving in public what they have suffered in private till now.

I do hope the society will treat the victims with the respect and sensitivity they deserve. I do hope the criminals will be called out, and at least some big fish will go to jail. But it won’t be easy.

In November 2013, Tarun Tejpal, a high-profile editor, sexually assaulted a colleague, who happened to be his daughter’s friend, on a lift in a Goa hotel. When the details, including CCTV footage came out, it seemed to be an open and shut case. But after five years, the man is out on bail, and the victim would have been dragged to courts repeatedly, adding societal insult to her personal injury. And it doesn't happen in India alone.

Recently, US senators chose to ignore Dr Christine Blasey Ford’s moving testimony against a sexual predator who shows no sign of remorse. Promoting an accused predator to the Supreme Court of the United States after a sham of an investigation was a public indictment of a completely credible victim.

But I do hope ultimately, the Me-Too movement in India will lead to a more civilised workplace for women in a country where lots of men bow before clay images of women, but grope them and rape them when they are in flesh and blood.

Thursday, 11 October 2018