After weeks of being stuck at home, I went out for a walk in the neighbourhood I grew up. It’s a bit of a drive from where I live now, but I felt I needed to do this. To clear my head, to recalibrate, to celebrate the living and to honour those who are leaving us soon or have left already.
When I was in Osaka (it seems a life time ago now), I frequented a very small bar off a street in Kita. One of those bars where the smoke perpetually hangs off the ceiling and a gaijin is a weird, tense presence. At precisely 10.30pm, the guy behind the counter would stop whatever was playing, switch the cables to his turntable and put on a record. The record was the same on each day I went.
In the haze of smoke and hard alcohol, I never managed to ask the bartender what he was playing, but for some reason had captured a brief recording of one of the songs on my phone. I had completely forgotten about it until a few weeks ago, when in the process of clearing out space on the phone, I found the recording.
Memories came flooding back. Of the bar, of the gnarly old dude on the table next to me on my last day yelling at the world, of the peanuts magically laced with nori. Mostly, the memory of that voice. Raspy, soaring, passionate and powerful.
I Shazamed the song.
That song was Hustlin’ Dan by the great Asakawa Maki from her 1972 album, Blue Spirit Blues. A quick YouTube search later, I was devouring the whole thing.
Asakawa Maki made dozens of albums and recordings but her work from the 70s are truly a league apart. The followup to Blue Spirit Blues, Rear Window is just as amazing.
Both these albums are on constant rotation on cloudy, stormy Bangalore evenings and nights where her voice and my memories of that bar in Osaka carry me through.
A few weeks ago in the middle of a major writing slump, I decided to start showing up. I’d forgotten how to do it. I’d wake up early, brew myself a cup of coffee and sit down to write. At 5am, an indigo dawn would be just faintly visible from where I sat.
I didn’t get (and haven’t gotten) any decent piece of writing done, but in the act of showing up and sitting down to create, I started to notice my old photographs and how they could do with a reimagining.
So these past weeks, I’ve been editing away, thinking about the moments I took those photographs, how I felt. Those moments of clarity, confusion, defeat and elation. All those emotions pored into the edit. The contrast, the brightness, the colour, the shadows and the highlights.
Writing gives me a high and for a long time, I felt that that particular high was only possible when I put fingers to keyboard or pen to paper. No longer. The photographs I create are beginning to give me that same feeling.
I am glad I started showing up.
“So, you are visting Nilambur for the third time, is it?”, asks Mr. K. The accent is hard and I can imagine his tongue rolling in his mouth for a good five seconds after he finishes talking. I cannot help letting out a giggle.
“What’s so funny?” foo-unnee
“Nothing, nothing. Yes, third time in town, but first time at your nice house.”
The power is out. We are sitting in the smallish verandah hearing the rain patter down. There’s a solitary, flickering hurricane lamp doing the honour of shining light on the proceedings. It isn’t going a good job, the glass scratched and vaguely opaque. Mr. K’s face is half lit, the neatly greased hair combed all the way back. The moustache combed and dense with a slight droop at the end. But I get the sense he may not be very proud of its current grooming.
Mrs. K brings in a steaming tumbler of jeera water. One girl professed her love for me over a similar tumbler long ago. I hate what the spice does to the water.
I ask if I can take a picture of both of them. “Maybe when the power comes back”, he grunts.
A hour later, the power hasn’t come back on. I am hearing the rain drown out all other sounds. A white noise machine on steroids.
Mrs. K walks out with a giant tray containing bowls of something liquid that vaguely looks like sambar, but I am not sure. There are also _dosas_ that look a splat of white paint. Kerala cuisine maybe refined, beautiful and amazing, but I suspect no one gave Mrs. K the memo. Later that night, I eat a pack of Krackjack biscuits to stop my stomach from rumbling a lot.
By now, there is rum. I am not sure what brand, but it is present lots of quantities in three sombus. Mr. K, looks longingly at the copper tumbler and nails the drink. Some rum glistens on his moustache.
“Good, no?” I nod. Either this is a going to be a long night or everyone is just going to fall down and sleep where they are sitting right now.
One _sombu_ down.
There is talk about Kerala, Tamil Nadu (“only thing worthwhile are the temples”), Bangalore (“death to beer drinkers and pubs”), Mallapuram, communists, Narendra Modi, the steam engines that once paraded around in Shoranur, the benefits of red chillies in omelets, Valayar Ravi, the export of teak, the comforts of Sandak footwear, the usefulness of hair oil for one’s armpits and the “amazing smell” of Cuticura talcum powder among other things.
At least that’s what I think was discussed.
One more sombu down.
Somewhere in between, payasam was served. I don’t remember what it was made of though or how sweet it was.
I am bored by now. There is only so much one can take from what seems like an abusive and bigoted middle aged man. I curse Pico Iyer and his ideals. Get bored, he said. Boredom makes you ask good questions, he said. Boredom doesn’t give you easy answers, he said.
Two hours later, I am alone with my boredom and the rain. The sounds amplified. Its sight illuminated by the dim incandescence of a bulb that purports to be a street light. I watch as the tip of a leaf catches a drop, bends in sublime slow motion and lets it fall. Outside Mr. K’s bedroom window, a young boy is pissing.
When I was about 6, we had a neighbour move in across the hall. He was a dashing fellow — tall, mostly wore shorts and always tied his hair in a loose pony tail. My mother tried to keep me from interacting with him much, but when a young impressionable boy is shown an array of board games not previously seen, it soon becomes an impossible task.
One of the more remarkable things about him was that he was fluent in 7 languages. Once, I walked into his home during some reconstruction and maintenance work and was astounded at his ability to switch languages on the fly. He was simultaneously berating the guy doing the tiling work in Tamil while providing tips to another in Kannada. The Telugu chap wasn’t spared either, receiving decidedly child unfriendly invectives.
The incident stayed in my head for a while and when we were vacating the house a few years later, I asked him about his skill. He looked up from his soldering board and said, “Practice, practice”, with a wink. The key he said was to think in only one language but continuing that train of thought into others as one speaks. So, he would think in Tamil, but continue those thoughts into Kannada or Telugu or Odiya and output it via speech.
This blew my mind and I kept working at it for a number of years before being able to somewhat do this using English as the thought language and speak in Tamil, Kannada and Telugu at roughly the same time and in quick succession.
Over the past few months to keep myself sharp and distracted with what’s happening in the world I’ve taken on a few side projects: A full scale rewrite of the IRFCA website and its various database apps, an wonderful learning resource addition to The Community Library Project and a thing I can’t quite talk about yet. All three are based on different languages and frameworks. The IRFCA site’s apps are all built using Ruby (with Rails), the library’s site is in PHP (WordPress) and the thing I can’t talk about yet is built using Python (Django).
I’ve mostly managed to keep the time working on them separate – one weekend this, one morning that and so on. But every now and then, two or more of them will require my attention at the same time. And when this happens, I really struggle to shift the context. I know what I am supposed to do, but I am just not able to speak the language, commit to the grammar and put things down on screen.
My usual system of thinking in one language and taking that to others fails here. The grammar and syntax are far less forgiving and I find myself tripping too much. I know what I am supposed to say and I say it, but it simply doesn’t make sense to the interpreter.
Human (natural?) languages have a pliability and looseness of structure that makes it easier for someone across you to understand, even if you don’t know the language well or are not able to express the nuances. Computer languages not so much.
It used to be that I could write my way out of sadness. Not a particular sadness, but that all compassing, persistent layer that sits above everything and barely lets anything past. I would pick up the old notebook, open a fresh page and let the pen glide and dictate. But try as much as I can, I am unable do that these days. The pen acts as if its set in concrete. Keyboard and screen are a poor substitute. Sadness requires you to feel what you write. That physical contact with paper, the calm, familiar sound that a nib or a point make. Both have a rhythm and metronome that propels you forward and deeper into drawing out whatever is causing the sadness.
So I’ve taken to making bowls of ramen.
At first, just like writing, it seemed an odd choice, full of difficult things to wade through despite the end product being simplicity itself. And like writing, it takes practice to make a good bowl of ramen. (Unlike writing, where a certain kind detachment to the world can and does help, making ramen means being fully immersed. There is no off switch.)
To make a good bowl, it takes a day.
One starts with the broth — a big pot of water, some 10-12 cloves of garlic, a 2-inch cube of ginger, 2 large onions, a handful of carrots and celery, dried mushrooms of any kind, plenty of salt and pepper and the magic ingredient, sea kelp. The first time I made dashi, the ramen broth without kombu, it was utterly insipid, a bit like INXS without Michael Hutchense.
To bring all of this to a rumbling boil takes time, lots of time — an hour atleast. Time for you watch the steam escape and ruminate on the sadness that wraps around your heart like a damp, tight shirt in the summer. Making dashi is perfect for those times within the great sadness when you just want to stew in it. You don’t want to get out it, you don’t want to talk about it to anyone, you just want to be with your sadness and let it steep you with whatever it has got. Then you add dark and light soya to the broth which muddies up the whole thing. Which is perfect because at this point you really aren’t sure about what to do with your sadness, so you go do something else, like watch Anthony Bourdain eat great quantities of offal and enjoying it.
The muddy broth keeps on simmering. 2 hours, 3 hours, 4 hours. Then you’ve had enough of Tony Bourdain so you switch off the gas and think about what’s next.
Noodles for the bowl can’t be made when faced with this dull, encompassing kind of sadness. For that you need a brief flash of anger, a moment of deep regret and the ensuing sharp sadness. It has to be directed at someone or something. Most people would describe making udon a very zen like process. It is. But it is precipitated by something entirely un-zen like.
So you wait until the next day. Or two days. Or three days. When inevitably the sharp sadness comes on, directed at things real and unreal, people real and imagined. This is when you need to get on with it. You have at most an hour or two before the sadness is blunt. A good udon takes three or more.
First, the dough needs to be combined. This is not as easy as it sounds. Chapati/Roti dough making is violent — you stretch and pull with all your might. Here, you can’t. Brute strength will only make the dough too stretchy and therefore too chewy in the end. You go about it with a cadence, that for lack of a better word, you’d call effiminate.
Then you seal it in a plastic bag and let it rest for half an hour. Half an hour later, you cover the bag with a nice thick cloth, lay it out on the floor and “knead” with your legs. This sounds like fun and it is, for maybe thirty sec, then you start worrying about whether you are overdoing it. Your sadness meanwhile is confused. It has worries of its own. It feels like it is losing its battle, but then it finds new vigour and attacks the vanguard. At this time, you slow down and focus and wait for 2 minutes for the dough to rest. You then take the dough out, roll it into a ball, put it back into the bag and set aside for half hour again.
Knead. Repeat. Knead. Repeat. Fun. Sad. Fun. Sad.
Now comes the rolling. At this point, the sadness more confused than ever, its vanguard attacks failing tries something different. It attacks you deeply, questioning your competence to do the next task. When one writes, there is a point in time in the whole process where everything seems to be in place, yet nothing is done and you are lost and on the verge of tearing up the pieces of paper. This is that time.
Rolling is daunting. True masters roll dough with the precision of a calliper and the economy of a ruler. The goal is get to an even 3mm thickness. The key to this is dividing the dough into a lazy grid. You focus on making each square and its adjacent square as perfectly level as possible. Then the next set and then next one and so on. This is where you’ll fail the most initially. There will be an unexpected lump that wouldn’t flatten, an unseemly tear that will mean starting from scratch, some extra flour on the rolling pin that will mysteriously distribute itself unevenly across. Each of these, an extra arrow in the sadness’s quiver.
The sadness has followed me for close to two years. I’ve gotten to 5mm in that time.
They say that attack is the best form of defense, so you take up a sharp knife, preferably a cleaver, and cut through the dough and the fog of grief and anger. You transfer the rolled out dough carefully to a flat, raised board and fold in half gently. Any loss in focus here is disaster as the dough can break, ruining your ramen forever and pushing you to more despair.
Take a steel ruler and line it up along the edge of the dough, 2mm in. You should picture a strand of noodle before you take the cleaver down. Do it once. Move the ruler another 2mm in and take the cleaver down. You’ll know have a few strands of noodles. The sadness will scream inside of you — it knows its being defeated, it will fight back, but the cleaver means business. Slowly, but surely, the rhythm and metronome of pen on paper beings to appear in the cleaver and ruler. The sounds are remarkably same.
After a while, the sharp sadness is gone and you are left with a fresh batch of noodles. You bring to boil another pot of water, but now the steam doesn’t make you ruminate — it’s time will come again. You drop the noodles in for 3 minutes and immediately after, put them in a bowl of ice water. Good noodles should be cold, just as your heart as is when you’ve managed to deal with the sadness and won a small victory.
When you retrieve your broth from yesterday or the day before, it will stare back at you with the sadness that went into making it, but you no longer care about that. You heat it up, drop the cold noodles in and be surprised at the warmth it spreads through you.
As so often is the case, the very worst news needs to be delivered when you completely inaccessible. I was on a train and out of network coverage, so my father, ever ingenious, tracked my express down by bombarding the traffic controller out of Secunderabad with incessant phone calls. This is how I found myself woken up in the middle of the night by a extremely portly station manager and told to de-train immediately. “Your uncle A has died. There’s a train back home in half hour from here. Catch it.”
(more…)It’s been a longish day, unusually hot for Bangalore. Mother is at home, fussing over a piece of furniture that hasn’t been cleaned properly. This is how the routine goes when she’s staying over and I return from work: Hi how was your day was it ok are you tired do you want juice what do you want for dinner will you be cooking or should I? On most days, I end up picking the knife and ladle but today, she volunteers.
The heat has me sapped and confused so I head to the balcony to catch some breeze.
(more…)Outside, the rain is falling in sheets. Inside, the room is sparse and dimly lit. Enough to cast deep shadows on my wrinkled face. A gaggle of children is gathered in a semi circle.
I am telling them stories of a beautiful railway that existed decades ago.
(more…)
Re-reading Barthes’ Camera Lucida when both of them are ill seems like an act of masochism. Perhaps it is. But in a strange way, the book is comforting. The grief in it is all consuming and blanketing, an adobe shell while everything inside me is liquid and churning. The more I photograph them, the more I am aware of their mortality and what I might do in the inevitable loneliness of it.
I photograph these days mostly to combat my loneliness. A thing bought on by my continuing depression, a string of relationships unrequited and an inexplicable (perhaps not so inexplicable) abandonment of friends. I have found in the last few months a comfort in the sound of the shutter closing. A finality. A string of finalities. The significance of these finalities has begun to slowly dawn on me. I pointed this out to a friend a couple days ago, to which she replied, “Isn’t it obvious?”. Yes, to most. But for someone who is used to navigating with his heart, the dead end is same as the four-lane expressway.