Outlook in the Rann

Thanks to Peter and Amit, I travelled to the Little Rann for Outlook Traveller's wildlife guide last year. While most of the piece was information-based, it also required a personal experience story to open the article. Since the book is available now, here is the story:

Near a durgah in Bajana, Junaid curved his jeep onto a narrow bumpy path that ran beside a village. Tribeswomen emerging from the Rann walked by barefoot, balancing above them enormous stacks of wood. Some stopped to eye the vehicle from the vantage point of a dune beside the path. Beneath them was a strange thing: tiny stacks of flat stones above large bumps in the dune. These are the graves of sweepers, Junaid said, buried outside the village by other sweepers. No one else could touch a sweeper, he continued, they could just not be touched. He drove by without pause, his face impassive. He had done this many times before, I reasoned. Why should he be surprised? He might even be bored.

“Bored? Never,” he smiled, and his face turned harder, more worn, when he did this. “I like the birds and I like driving here. It is a superhighway,” he said, as we rattled noisily over the bumpy trail, with bushes scratching metal along the way. This went on for a while. Thick bushes lay beside the path, there was bare soil on either side, and a cloudless sky above. There was no sign of life, not another sound.

Bajana Creek, when we arrived at it, was packed with birds. The air was filled with squeaks and cries and squawks and chirps. The sharp smell of salt was everywhere. The ground was cracked, white with saline. I stepped out and heard a satisfying crunch, nice as popping bubble wrap. At the edge of the creek, translucent orange dragonflies flew about, settling around me, moving only if I moved. There were cranes from Siberia, spot-billed ducks, flamingo, pelican. They moved away as I drew closer, and as their alarm spread in waves, they too took flight in waves.

We travelled further into the desert and, at some point, left behind a world we knew. Past a rusty forest office signboard with simple illustrations of ‘lion, tiger, leopard’, animals which had no business here, there was a vast empty expanse. Junaid said nothing. He stopped the car and fiddled while I looked ahead. It was massive. From horizon to horizon, there was nothing but flat land and the odd shrub, making it strangely claustrophobic. No one had mentioned that. People discussed wild ass and passing birds and the flat cracked soil. But desolation and the enormity of the Little Rann? No. I wonder why. It’s not something you’re likely to forget soon.

And then, as I was boggled by its size, Junaid leaned forward and the car lurched right into the Rann. 60,70,80,90… what was fast here? What could it be placed against? The signpost behind disappeared, and only a faint track indicated our trail. “Look around, do you see the water everywhere?” he asked. “It’s a mirage.” Indeed, the horizon shimmered but came no nearer. But ever so often, lumps were seen in the distance. They were wild ass.

Seeing a wild ass isn’t as exciting as sighting a tiger. There is no mystery about them, and they have no aura. They are light brown, with muscular hind legs, and travel in small herds with one lookout. At the hint of a threat, real or imagined, they are off. “It’s illegal to chase them, but don’t even try. They can touch 80 kilometres an hour,” Junaid said. A more informed guide later revised this to around 70.

Hours later, under a shade, I chatted with a man whose family had lived here for centuries. He mentioned how extreme the Rann was, and how hostile it could be, both physically and mentally. “You could go mad here if you lost your way,” I commented. He began agreeing, but then scratched his chin. “Yes, but you know what the beautiful thing is? You might get lost here, but you’ll always be found. And what you saw? That was nothing. Absolutely nothing. You could be here for ages and keep seeing new things.”

Going and staying

After much fun and very little frolic, a busy fortnight has ended. We returned from Mauritius this morning to a quiet home, and immediately craved noise and laughter. The country was green and smelt fresh, the supermarkets made you want a better life, and the stars above did not twinkle but glow.

People of possibly Bihari descent spoke in buttery french, women swooning at their "bonjour"s and slick ways. Roads were smoother than the men - at 80kmph the car did not even whisper. But the rough ways of home were always missed because here, in Mumbai, you feel you are in the midst of history, that in this chaos are stories constantly written, while most of Mauritius' stories have already been written.

One good thing - among many good things - that came of this trip was the number of half-decent story ideas. More on these later. And through the stories, more on the trip later.

Plus one

When there's a lot going on in my real world life, blogging suffers first. The reason for this particular dry run is that I'm getting married. Normally there would be a lot to write about during a wedding, but my deep involvement in this has given me no time to consider or feel inclined toward writing anything either thoughtful or ordinary. Having said that, it is a new experience full of unexpected turns and discoveries. Most disorienting is the realisation that like with the back injury a month ago, contradictory advice comes from everywhere about all sorts of things. But we go on - sigh! - boy do we go on, keeping our sense of humour intact and hopefully our sense too.

By the pound

The fatter you are, the more you pay.

My precocious baby

Here, in The New Yorker.

Feeling Tendulkar

I remember a young Tendulkar. Oddly enough, I cannot imagine him as old. Back then there were no words to describe him, and so we sought out numbers to quantify him. The magnitude of his promise was boggling. Could there have been a man after Bradman with whom numbers were so intertwined? Lara came later, as did Warne and Muralitharan.

We did not, or could not, speak of saying goodbye to him. To have bid him farewell would mean breaking away with a decade of ourselves, and in remembering his mortality we were struck by our own. But ageless faces deceive. Bones creak, skin tears, muscles become less taut.

When the tennis elbow was diagnosed, there was alarm. Injuries happened to people, but not Tendulkar. Of course they had happened before: the bending over after the six over midwicket against Kenya in 1996, the back pain against Pakistan at Chennai in 1999. But this was different. Suspicions arose that this one would linger.

When he played again, there were flashes of 1994, of 1998, of a free man who cherished his freedom but accepted nothing less than complete submission from others. Who could not delight in authority like this? But there were other hours when he could have been anybody but him. This new man was patient and cautious, he nurdled and nudged. Risk was banished. Given his time in the game, it was understandable, but sad all the same.

Each time a man much younger touches his edge, or clatters into his stumps, I feel a dull blow, and hope he returns vengeful, and puts the bowler in his place. How often does it happen these days? Does it happen at all?

The memory of him as young and energetic is fading. Discussions with friends whose thoughts on cricket are more emotional than learned and rational, all involve hopes of seeing him scorch grounds one last time, and leaving us with an image of domination and control – in our minds it is where he belongs. But it is a hope born of despair, like a death too soon. Why were we not told of this change in the programme? Why could we not cherish that last free-spirited innings?

What will happen to India after he is gone? It is a fear I have, irrational as it is. But I sometimes suspect that the bigger fear lies under the surface - that India will not matter after Tendulkar. For my short career as a cricket writer, that is how it has been. I could never be as emotional about India as I have been about Tendulkar. Dravid is more reliable, Kumble has won more games, but they cannot capture the imagination as he can.

In November 2004, I was at the Wankhede when he made fifty-odd runs against Australia on a cracked pitch. The innings would have once been construed as a failure. Here it was a success, and everyone within the ground’s confines knew it. There was a glimmer of the past in his batting, and it took me, personally, to an early morning in Dubai, when I watched him open for the first time in New Zealand. That was when I latched on the game properly. Now that I think about it, when he goes, the game won't hold me the same way again.

The polite deviant

Steel girders hold up a sagging ceiling above Rajat Kapoor in his Willingdon Colony office but still, these are less precarious times. He once lived here for two years as a paying guest, and the ceiling was propped up by bamboo sticks then. He now resides in Andheri with a young family, but addresses are usually temporary. “It’s a 11-month thing. I’ve been shifting ever since I came to Bombay. I still don’t have a place. And I’m still a PG here.” The only residence of permanence for Kapoor, who wandered into theater before arriving in Mumbai, is Prithvi Theater. His group, Chingaari, performed here, and he has directed C for Clown and The Blue Mug here. “I love that space. I’m an honorary member there,” he says, smiling.

Framed movie posters hang on peeling pink walls above a neat bed. In the hallway outside, the cricket commentary is turned down while a new director auditions a model for his first movie. This particular director had helped with Raghu Romeo (2003) and Mixed Doubles (2006), which deals with the boredom of a married man. His own movie could only be made if Kapoor produced it. “It’s so hard for people who want to make their first films,” says Kapoor. “Until I started acting in 1999, I had no money at all.” The break came when a friend pulled out of an advertisement and asked him to audition for the role. Within four years he had saved 16 lakhs, which eventually helped to finance Raghu Romeo. Until then he wrote scripts, among which was Mithya, about a bad actor desperately seeking work, as well as reviews for Mumbai’s Mid-day, and kept writing, earning just enough for sustenance. “I don’t want to go back to those days of poverty,” he says silently. “It was a lot of anxiety and stress. The electricity bill had to be paid, and there were mental debates over whether to take the limited bus or the next one, which cost 50 paise less.”

Kapoor, now in his early 40s, was 15 when he decided to make films. The family accommodated his wish after two half-hearted years at his father’s printing press. “They said, ‘Okay, let him go for three-four years’”. Money was not an objective. He then spent three years in Bombay, assisting directors. But even then. Upon returning home after years of training, he says his unconvinced father asked, “Have you decided what you want to do?” The doubts would only subside when Kapoor’s 1994 film Tarana won a national award. “15,000 Rupees and a piece of paper”. The award was notional. It brought no respite and the rough years continued. Private Detective, for which Kapoor was paid Rs 50,000, did not release. This, coupled with his insistence on creative control, proved difficult. (His opinion of Syed Mirza is telling: “He made films that he wanted to. When he could not, he did not.”) Producers would ask why the movie had not released. It was excess baggage.

When Kapoor showed them the Mithya script, he came across a particularly avoidable breed of producer. “’Mindblowing!’ they would say.” Kapoor leaned back and threw his hands up. “And then they’d say, ‘Don’t take Naseeruddin Shah.’ They were very clear. If I took Madhavan, they would give me 1.2 crore. If I took Aftab Shivdasani, it would be a certain amount.” Money had not been important but it was necessary, and Bollywood’s soundtrack was the cash register. For Naseeruddin, they offered him 80 lakhs, but Kapoor required almost twice that. He also met reluctant actors in those days, weeks, and months of meetings, but nothing transpired. All the while he grew closer to Naseeruddin, who watched him work at Prithvi. This led to Monsoon Wedding.

“I was horrified when Mira [Nair] offered me the pedophile’s role.” It provoked an introspection equivalent to that of a homosexual come-on. Do I look gay? Do I look like a sex offender? “If it wasn’t for Mira and Naseer, I wouldn’t have done it.” His first impression was that doing the role was a big mistake. “I thought, fuck, people are going to beat me up.” But his advertising image of the gentle father was powerful, and this balanced things. Just then, on cue, roles landed at his doorstep - parts that only he could apparently play. “I got offers for roles like that. It was either the sexual deviant, or the bad guy, or the ‘very sophisticated guy who turns out to be the villain.’ This was continuous. And I kept saying no to everything, except Kisna, which I did a few years later.” Kisna was a turkey. He shrugs. “The role was good.”

Big-budget films do nothing for Kapoor. “How do you spend 8 crores?” he asks, wide-eyed. Life on the periphery does not make allowance for large budgets, and he accepts this. “I came in knowing it would be tough. Bollywood made a certain kind of film. So you prepare to be marginalized completely.” But since Mixed Doubles a door has opened, and offers for low-budget films are more frequent. The proposals moved him to address a note to his brother: “Finally I’m a practicing filmmaker.”

Kapoor is convinced that every gesture made, word spoken, and breath taken, has brought him to this point. He describes his life as a series of accidents, but hastily adds that willpower has also played its part. This is how he met at Churchgate Station the woman he would eventually marry. The theory thrills him. “Aren’t all lives like that? I’ve seen it in my life. Lennon says that life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”

There is something in this. Mithya, languishing for years, is ready to go. It will be filmed in July and August this year during the rains.

(This appeared in Tehelka, March 17.)

True grit

Marcus Berkmann on beach cricket. Hilarious.

Empathy

This is a pretty rough city if you aren't completely able physically.

The wrong funny bone

A few days ago I remembered a physics lesson. It was one of those long-forgotten things about Newton that was learnt on a drowsy afternoon and discarded with the school uniform. The timing was a little off, though. I was in mid-air, having leapt from a moving train, when I had the 'oh-oh' moment. On cue a passenger shrieked, "Wrong! Wrong!" - having watched me leap not with the train's movement, but in the opposite direction. Churchgate's platform dwellers quickly parted, anticipating correctly where I would land and how heavy the tumble would be.

A day later, I learnt that the tip of the tailbone is called the coccyx, and this upside-down pyramid-shaped bone is seriously taken for granted. You're sitting on it right now. If it breaks, the body shuts down for 48 hours. No bathroom. Winds will be strong. If it breaks and touches the intestine, it's trouble. If the break is more than 30 degrees, healing it involves a doctor, anesthetic, a gloved finger, and an embarrassing procedure. But most of all, if it breaks, you cannot sit down. Pharmacists will ask, "Sir, woh piles-waala ring chalega?" As I write this I am propped on three cushions. The piles-waala ring was unnecessary. Too many side effects.

"How?" concerned people ask in part-wonder and part-sympathy. I tell them. There is a pause. I can hear them smile at the other end. "Is it a..." they start, and I know what's coming. "... A pain in the ass?" How they live with it I can't tell. I sink into my cushion gingerly and mumble something to make the pain stop. But their coccyx is fine, and so they continue. "We must get to the bottom of this," or "Butt how are you?" and similar joyous witticisms. I leave them on hold and waddle over to my room to pamper my poor coccyx.

Injuries that leave you immobile are terrible, terrible things. You eat like Pacman, you think too much. You think of all the places you could be but can't. And then there are these horrible bum jokes. Enough, I say. Unless something original can be said. Something like "How about Brokeback Mountain?" Now that made me - wait for it - laugh my ass off.

What a whistle means

Three black men leaning on a wall outside a Broolyn convenience store on Myrtle Avenue broke into whistles and words as a woman walked by. The woman was Indian, and was often mistaken for Latin American, but these noises did not discriminate between nationalities. The men lived in the nearby ghetto and, given its violent reputation, were somewhat restrained in their opinions. Previously, one lady had returned home without looking over her shoulder and found, when she shut the door and turned around, a rather large and unknown man from the ghetto in her living room. Another had returned late on a winter evening and was raped in her brownstone lobby by someone who had posed as a resident. Stories of being followed were endless. When the police and fire departments were diverted to Manhattan on September 11, crime spurted and, if my memory is true, women friends stayed indoors.

It was a Sunday afternoon when we passed by the three men. There was barely anyone else around, and their presence made the moment seem as threatening as a late night stroll. Suddenly it was unwise to be here – daylight did not matter when the street was deserted. She was thin and tiny, and I could not possibly fight them. But there was pride. “Don’t just stand there, do something,” the inner masochist appealed. Caught between machismo and caution I paused briefly, but she took my arm reflexively, yanking me back into stride.

Down the lane she smiled unexpectedly and said, “It’s not all bad. Delhi was much, much worse. These guys were appreciating me, and I’m flattered. You think it’s all abuse, but it’s not. With some guys you can just tell what they mean.”

An empty room

The empty room's prospective inhabitants study the afternoon light, guess the arc of the sun, inhale the room’s scent, familiarize their mind with walls and open spaces. They decide upon the method of transformation, for just as the mind needs a readjustment with new places to make them personal, so do spaces need alteration to fall in line with the mind’s eye. How do we make this space us, they ask. It must be unique, they decide, or it will not be us. It must speak of us, it must speak to us, and over time even in silence it will connect with us.

So what is it to be, they ask each other? Then takes place a negotiation involving words and body language. They may not understand the other but will try to. There will be the slightly surprising realization that dream homes consist of shared ideas. Talks will continue, and the empty space will be mentally altered until it nearly satisfies both dreamers. Between the two something new is born. A new way of looking. An empty room has given it life because from empty rooms spring conscious dreams, which always reveal. The two have seen something new about each other, and perhaps themselves, in the negotiations. Mental notes have been made. Things have been understood – the sort that words cannot elucidate.

The room is bare, but it is still full with interaction. This first empty room is as revealing as hours of conversation.

Minus one

When a sister got married recently, her absence left a blankness few of us were familiar with. It felt like a loss, not the victory we were used to in this family of males. People always came, no one ever left. It felt generous. When families are large and close, there is warmth and variety and giving. It is a club to which you have gained admission, and we feel large-hearted for accepting without judgment (mostly). But how can this feeling be extended to loss? Now, like a new word that you suddenly notice everywhere, there are sisters all around, only a few years away from leaving. There will be gains as well, for a generation of boys are becoming men, but these defeats are not easy to forget. We are suddenly minus one, and the realignment of family takes a long time – time we want nothing to do with, time we don’t want to know of. This endearing bunch of embarrassing nicknames will be elsewhere, and change will affect them in more ways than just by name. These walking targets will move out of range, leaving their brothers lost and pining for them.

"What a lovely pair of earrings!"

They're coming here. For what it's worth, I'm looking forward to listening to BBC's Test Match Special. This is wonderful news.

There's other superb news as well, which is why there's been very little blogging, but more on that some other time.

The Girl

A book reading by Sonia Faleiro and Shantaram was attended. He asked her pertinent questions and signed off with a warm endorsement of her writing. I've forgotten the words, but the gist remains: "Wonderful writer who will only get better. Good book." Said writer sat quietly with massive grin on face, which grew even more expressive when a moving question was asked.

Good luck, Sonia.

Voices

Once more a home comes alive. Voices have become deeper, some have become more self aware. They've grown up. Not a room is silent. Beds have piled up in a corner, halfway up the wall. The shoe closet is a sea of footwear, the ironing table is always hot. Somewhere between active relatives and tired relatives is a bride to be. She sits and sleeps and walks and jogs and talks like the rest of us, like it's a regular vacation. Were it not for the embroidered clothes and rustle of gift wrapped packages, no one would know she was on the verge of marriage.

The children play the fool when adults aren't around, and play adults when they are. Too eager. They can't wait to be adults. Just wait till they are. Then we'll see the fun.

A little late, but...

Here's Metblogs Mumbai, where I've resolved to blog more regularly. Here's my post on how pavements make for a happier city.

The Circus: Conversations

There is a wedding in the family. Twenty to thirty relatives are expected within the next five days. This is a good thing and a bad thing. It will mean saying goodbye to solitude for a little while, and it almost certainly means no decent writing can happen, but they will bring with them plenty of blogging material. Some of them are blogging material. The match-maker aunt, for instance. Wonderful lady, but if she smiles at you, it's because she has found you a match. There's an uncle so devastatingly unremarkable, we remember him by the bit role (2 seconds long) he had in a film. There are others, oh, there are others.

So we'll start off the 'Circus' series with a delightful back-and-forth that took place over the phone earlier today. These are the last three lines of a long conversation between a tired and screaming relative and the shopkeeper from whom she bought her faulty shoes:

"Couldn't you call and tell me this?! Why did I have to call you?!"

"You didn't give us your number. You said..."

"WHY COULDN'T YOU TAKE MY NUMBER, HUH?!"

It flu after the pills wore off

News from faraway lands: Sharjah.

An uncle took a breather from wedding preparations and lapsed into silence. But his thoughts were not with his daughter, nor the stacks of wedding cards.

"You know this bird flu thing? You know what they're doing in Sharjah? They're giving all the birds sleeping pills so their activities are restricted! Chariya. Bhendeya, chariya."

Indeed. Chariya.

Waking up in the age of instant messages

Rang de Basanti is a story about the sustained awakening of a close-knit group of adults, and how their growing disillusion leads them down a desperate road. Faced with the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of life in India, they find escape in an unexceptional and anonymous life, where expectations are small and laughter is a means of keeping inevitable misery at bay. When we first meet them, we realise that they have already woken up to life’s offerings and given up in a puff of cynicism. Nothing will change, they say to us over and over, but when the group is touched by misfortune, they snap out of their stupor, stop talking, and begin to act.

The story opens with Alice Patten, who plays Sue, a documentary filmmaker, facing a stone wall. Having prepared to translate to film the jottings of a diary by her grandfather who, as a jailer, oversaw the hangings of Bhagat Singh and his friends, she is told that there aren’t enough finances to fund the project because Bhagat Singh isn’t popular enough. “Gandhi sells,” she is advised. Sue walks away and completes the documentary independently. There is in this a story within a story. Rakeysh Mehra faced numerous challenges to finance Rang de Basanti, and it is entirely possible that the advice he was given, when he revealed that Singh would feature prominently in the film, is similar to what Sue was told.

The group fills the role of Singh and the rest in Sue’s film, and when their painstaking work is done, a series of tragic events sees them continue in a revolutionary mood and, like Singh, act to attract attention. But times have changed and, instead of their deeds bringing notice to corruption and apathy in the government as they had planned, their efforts are in vain. This relentless back and forth struggle, where a few individuals seek truth from a featureless and unwilling entity, sets up the dramatic final act of this resonant movie. While that end, in retrospect, requires a slight suspension of reality by the watcher, the desperation that leads to the end is entirely believable.

The film plays the present off the past, juggling between the two, as DJ (Aamir Khan) and his vibrant friends are replaced by Singh and his gang mid-scene, and in conversation. The obvious reference is to history repeating itself, and as the shift occurs, it feels like a hop between parallel universes. What shape could the next fight for independence take?

But there are smaller issues at hand. As the group expands to accept Laxman Pandey (Atul Kulkarni), a Hindu nationalist, they begin to understand each other in the way only proximity allows. Sue and DJ strike a friendship, much to the expectations of their friends and everyone else watching, and she inadvertently brokers a truce between Laxman and the rest. Within one large story there are several other plotlines, some completed, others left hanging, and almost all real. The forts where they move about, where they choose to rest, all hint at a longing for the past – anything to avoid the future.

As each character grows, so does the dialogue, and this transition from the irreverent at the start to the focused and optimistic at the film’s end is one of its many strengths. That the camera hovers away from one set of characters to follow the others, and then cuts back to them, is another. An exchange between DJ and Sue, where he momentarily lets down his guard and speaks in Punjabi while she nods and smiles, is a particularly poignant one because the roles are reversed between them.

The two could represent more than their characters. It’s odd, but Indian cinema still depicts the white man chiefly as colonizer, and not as thinking individual. Here the movie falters, but it is necessary for this story: Indian aggressors are shown as faceless, as the new colonizers. And when Sue breaks down upon hearing the final violent path DJ has chosen, we realize that the England and India of 59 years ago have changed places.

Rang de Basanti is an unusual story because it presents another point of view: that patriotism doesn’t come from loving your country blindly, and that for some it may not come at all. That's fine, but it isn’t enough to sit about and complain – if it’s broke and you’re upset, fix it.