Aarushi's murder

Aarushi’s murder does shock me and every once in a night when I wake up I wonder how could someone be killed in the beauty and confinements of their own home? Isn’t our home the best place? It is the safest, where we store our smells, our dreams, our concerns, our fantasies? How can that be our grave or our coffin?

So I awake sometimes in the middle of the night thinking what it must be for Aarushi to lose her life on a bed that she had slept on from the time she came to live in that house or that room. Did she see a dark figure stalling in and slitting her throat in a jiffy, before she could even scream or did she know the face of the person coming to kill her – in that matter her fears even worse of mistrust and sheer terror. Of course you can’t feel death and by the time you feel the wholesome of it you are already dead but what about the minutes or hours before that. What when she ate her dinner and retired to bed? Did she read a comic book? Or watch a late night tv show? Did she say her prayers? Were her thoughts regular? Or did she had an inkling that that was to be the last night of her life, the most gruesome which could never have been imagined. If we were to ever imagine our own deaths, which I am sure we do some time or the other thanks to the powers of imagination bestowed on mankind we do imagine it to be painless and surreal maybe a mishap, an accident but very rarely gruesome, painful, terrifying and so so unexpected.

It is done in the quietness of your own home. What worse place could you have asked to die and what better place I think sometimes? The place where you grew up and knew the best and are so familiar with should be the place where you life ends in a blood-slain way. The bed in which you sleep, soaking with the blood of your body. Too much, I say and the tamasha that follows after this brings out so much of human fallacies that we mask behind glossy ‘mature’ tv serials and uniforms and protocols and proceedings and files. Actually, we are all still barbaric and so wild, almost animalistic.

Anyway, may Aarushi’s soul rest in peace. May she not carry with her the terrors of her last birth (this one) to the next and may she help all the people who loved her find justice and eventual peace. She could have been. She still is. She will never be forgotten – always remembered – for the moments of grief and acute terror she must have gone through in the confines of her own home before her unjustified and untimely death.

book reading

After the world renowned author had clicked pictures with up-for-grabs Ms. Mammaries, they settled for dinner and a slight chit chat of books and events.
He said he took 6 hours to travel to a place of book signing.
A writer’s life involves a lot of hardwork, nods the enterprising bimbette.

They sat down and he narrated once again with a little quirkiness how he answered his fans never-before-asked questions. The girls, their breasts oozing out, looked at one another. What was it with writers? It was the duty of fans to ask. If they were intelligent, they wouldn’t ask.
They snigger. They sip.
He continues from the memory of heat, dust, crowd…

… Sir, now that you are famous haven’t you thought of rubbing the noses of the publishers in the mud, those that had rejected you?
he: I have not only rubbed their noses but wrestled them down into wet sand. I have knee-jerked their groins and poisoned their wine.

Question 2: Sir, you are the best writer in English (a tapeworm squiggles within). How can my daughters write like you? They have read all your books but I want them to write like you.
Answer: There is a particular grass found on the banks of a river in South Asia. You need to pluck fresh offshoots and eat it within moments of tearing it from the soil. It will fire imagination. For further inspiration, swim naked in the Yamuna for a period of 20 days. And there you have a book ready.
[Two or three people have left the room in inexplicable haste.]

Q 3: Which is your favorite Indian book?
A: The Kamasutra.

Q4: No Sir, literary book.
Answer: Oh. A suitable boy by Vik Seth. He is a story teller like no other. I bought two of his books at the traffic signal. Those mobile boys with snorty noses sold them to me. Must say, your country has a unique cab door-to-cab door delivery system.

Q5: (a chirpy, adamant girl): So, how do you get ideas for your stories?
Answer: Oh, it’s a natural process.
I am God-gifted. Period.
I glean the newspapers – the crime and gore section. I suck on research.
I think.
I write.
I redraft (around 17 times).
I pray.
I am totally God-gifted.

q. Sir, would you like to say anything to us, your fans.
Yes.
1. why do you’ll always find mistakes in my books and send me long messages on them?
2. why are there more writers than fans at every book signing event I go to?
3. why do you’ll have so many questions?
4. why do you’ll drive the way you’ll do on the roads? Why does no one follow the white lines?
5. why is cricket and sex...I mean Bollywood more interesting than literature in this country?
5. why is it so hot?
6. why are women here more attractive than men?
7. why…

[The mob closes in. There are books to be signed and the store closes at 8:30. There is only half an hour before the next IPL match.]

Proud to be whoever-that-is-I-am

I got a call from a longtime back school friend who has proudly been a tailor for 11 years. “A master tailor at Raymonds,” he said which made me sit up and think if I would ever be as proud to have a measuring tape slung over my neck, a chalk in one hand, a scissors in the next. But these are the periphery. I am sure he doesn’t look at it this way. From the outside. His gaze has long past gone over the much obvious - shirting and suiting tacks and piles - takkas as we call them to the more esoteric: the designs, fit and satisfaction in the eyes of the customer after creating a well-worth piece of stiched fabric. It is a moment to be proud. We are both creators. In fact, he can even talk to his consumer and see the glint of smiling satisfaction. I will have to make do with the dreary statistic (as, when and if). But we both hang up our wares proudly in front of us on mannequins first, a nip there, a tuck here and then see how the actual person would try it on.

Also, his pride was palpable and rarely have I come across people even with more ’sophisticated’ jobs talking with this much pride. If the people are good, the processes suck. If the processes are good, the management sucks. If the management is good, the work sucks. If the work is good, the commute sucks. We never have an absolute chime in our sentences when talking of our work. So, my first instinct to Hemant’s absolute pride was lash-fluttering disbelief. But then when I quickly came to terms with it, I congratulated him and joined in this so- rare-a celebration of one’s work.

Ah, Proud to be whoever-that-is-I-am and Completely so.

the dream

I was once taken to a Rinpoche and even his name was not available to me. We sat on wooden benches, my friends and me, and even them I couldn't retell who they were. It was a dream, which was real.

We sat. We waited. Till the Rinpoche entered the room. His eyes steady, deep. He recited his advice to us by mind-reading our problems and I got shifty thinking that my innermost problems were out in the open (because of him) for all to see, or rather hear. But I shouldn't have worried because when I checked later with the others they said the same thing. They heard the solution to only their problems. All else was hidden. How could the Rinpoche talk to one and all at the same time, in the same tongue, with the same language and yet mean differently to different people?

My head spun into the morning.

"It's the same source" my conscious mind concluded.

Bah.

Jaguar Lights (2007)

 

Fumiyaki-San

The worst thing Fumiyaki-San could have done was sit towards the far end of the swimming pool, watching me climb out of it, as I fumbled over the slippery steps. The best thing Fumiyaki-San could have done was to attempt cooking Japanese fried rice in my kitchen. He was a vague, funny man this guy. Very interested in food, in women and rice wine but very uninterested in language arts and politics, even the history of his own country.

He lived in an inn, one of those cheap one-room accommodations you get in a crowded city like Seoul and he spent most of his evenings with Jackie, my Korean friend, courting her or trying to get her into bed or with me and my husband at the pool or sauna room. He even tried his lop-sided Japanese-English on me ”Ah! you looking very good. very sexy, today” or “Ah, beauteefool” appreciating my attire, which would mostly be a lazily put together maroon skirt with blockprinted gold on it matched with a similar colored t-shirt. It made me blush, those remarks. Understanding from where it was coming and also the uncanny earnestness with which they were delivered.

Fumiyaki-San made me spend a small fortune, the day he proclaimed it was his birthday, on buying spice and chicken. We already had some chicken stored up in the fridge but he insisted it was not going to be enough. However, when he reached home and saw the packets, he said we were over-stocked. I called my husband home early from work and we foursome celebrated with our choicest wine, Fumiyaki-San’s birthday. We toasted, sang on an off-key note and drank. Only later, halfway through the meal were we to realize that it wasn’t his birthday. That was next week. There had been some misunderstanding.

So, we celebrated Fumiyaki-San’s birthday a second time. The real one. This one at Jackie’s parents home tucking into plateloads of kimchi - carrot, spinach, root, and colors that make up for a tangy rainbow with large bowlfuls of mackerel soup and shreds of boiled chicken. We wished him well as the topic changed to politics. Jackie’s father brought out the long-awaited hatred he possessed (through years of thinking, I presume) for the Japanese occupation and sought to be excused by Fumiyaki-San as he was a guest! But Fumiyaki-San wasn’t bothered. Not when we compared the aristocratic British to the ruthless Japanese rulers in an attempt to forge our niche, coy Korean-Indian friendship. Nor when we drew parellels between Pakistan and North Korea.

Fumiyaki-San finished the kimchi and started on a second round of mackerel soup, nodding blatantly and I wondered if Jackie’s mom and grandmom (Aabojee) would have anything left to eat. (Because they stood in the kitchen like two decent women from old time India waiting to serve upon their guest).

I teased Fumiyaki-San later, remembering how he had bluffed me on my tightly controlled budget against surplus chicken, parsley (the bottle of which I brought to India till it rotted away) and tomato sauce (a whole new bottle, when we already had enough for his chicken recipe).
I didn’t tell him how I had cut corners to allow a shopping budget for the end of the stay. He smiled his disarming smile and continued picking at his fish.

Fumiyaki-San didn’t teach me anything. Yet with his flabbergasted, half-flustering sentences he formed the backdrop to my visit in Seoul. I remember him sometimes when I think of Seoul, the snow or the extremely inane moments that come in between great ones.

Or am I being too presumptuous? Maybe, he did teach me something and I refused to learn.
I’ll be back because I need to figure out Fumiyaki-San and why he stuck in my memory for so long (It’s been a year, almost).

I shudder to just let it go.

(c) Rochelle Potkar

A dark moment comes

I crossed through the inky black waters of the night. Not a God, a spirit guide or an angel was in sight. Not even an allusion, a fleeting vision, a guiding hint was whispered from a higher self. I was all alone. On two sides stood pain and fear, more visible and loyal than anyone else. They were forces almost powerful and for the first time I understood that humans are embodiments of emotions and that a prime emotion makes body of a human mind.

Why had the God’s abandoned me? Is it because pain and fear were already there and were enough to teach? One guiding the other, the other riding the back of the former?

The sky hadn’t been lit with pristine light yet. And already I knew what I wanted to do.
"Eat it" I went to the fruit I had, just the previous day, out of mirth, scribbled on ‘criticism’ and changed it to ‘pain’ ‘fear’.
And don’t you think the Gods had answered, even in their stark silence?