…is that there are no words in it for the things that really matter.

For instance, why is there no English word that describes the glowing warmth that you feel running through you when you stand under a shower on a cold winter morning and give yourself utterly to the rushing water. A sensation that is both implosion and relief, a reassertion of the self wrapped in a cocoon of flowing warmth, a return to an ur-womb, where muscles become irrelevant. The temptation to just stay there, complicit in the moment’s liquidity, safe in the privacy of a heat that no one else can share. And the terrible wrench of having to face the world afterwards, the enormous sense of loss you feel as you turn off the shower knob, sense the cold making its first lecherous advances – the moment passing as easily as the mist you wipe off the mirror to find your own face.

Why is there no word for the innocence of water, its essential forgivingness; for the ease with which it kneads its way through the skin of our defenses, its fingers more skilful than a lover’s?

Every time I turn off the shower in the morning I am reminded of Dickinson:

Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

Categories: Whimsy

You know how people read different sections of the newspaper – some people read the business pages, others read sports, others focus on the editorial pages, or the arts?

I read the obituaries.

No, seriously. Every single day, after I’ve checked out the cartoons and weather in the New York Times (and vaguely skimmed the headlines), I will turn to the obituaries section and spend a good ten to fifteen minutes reading up on who died the previous day. Let other people follow stocks or Angelina Jolie’s love life – I follow Death.

Thinking about it, there are a number of reasons that I like reading the obits. First, there’s something about them, as news, that feels unbiased – this is not some flavour of the month thing, some combination of media frenzy and Republican spin – the facts here are accurate, and certainly the people featured have no vested interests in projecting a certain image. Dead people are really dead – they’re not in there for the ratings.

Second, there’s something about obituaries that seems more permanent, that puts the news in its proper perspective. Despite the NYT’s tendency to fill its obit pages with some fairly obscure people, you can’t help feeling that Death is a kind of filter, winnowing the chaff of everyday trivia from the grain of what truly mattered. Public obituaries are, in a very local and myopic sense, the judgement of history – what is newsworthy here is not an event but rather the whole life of the person leading up to it. This is the scale that human achievement should be measured on.

Even the more obscure obituaries serve this ‘historical’ purpose, by the way. If the purpose of history is to help us learn from the past, then the very obscurity of the people listed on that page in the New York Times can serve as both an Ozymandiacal reminder of the insignificance of even the most dramatic events of our day, as well as an affirmation of the unchanging nature of man’s ambition. To read some of these obituaries is to see the past hold up a mirror to the present, to recognise that our capacity for scandal is not new and that power, sex and greed have always led to uproar and downfall, even in times that we, in our new found arrogance, now consider innocent.

Third, obituaries are strictly one-time things. Any given person will only die once, after all, so if you miss his / her obituary on the day it comes out, you’re never going to get to see it again. This means that there’s a sense of urgency to obituaries (ironically enough) that there isn’t to much of the other news we read. You know more innocent people are going to be killed in Iraq, you know some new revelation about the Bush administration’s complete disregard for due process is going to surface, you know that George Clooney is going to be seen at a restaurant with some other starlet and we’re all going to pretend we’re interested – but miss the edition that carries the news of Milosz’s death, and it could be months before you know that one of your favourite poets of all time is lost to us forever.

Finally, I am always astounded by the democracy of death, by the easy camaraderie it makes possible. Saints and murderers, poets and politicians, pop-stars and scientists all rub shoulders on the obit page – it is the one section of the newspaper that remains a testament to the sheer breadth and scope of the human enterprise, of the infinite variety of things that human beings are capable of. What was it Shakespeare said:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o’ the great;
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke:
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.

You know how people dream of getting their picture in the paper? The Times obituaries is the section I’m eventually gunning for.

Categories: Personal

The science of dentistry (as some of you may know) was first developed around three thousand years ago in Ancient China, where it was used as an advanced and highly stylised form of hand-to-hand combat. In those halcyon times, brave warriors would fight duels where they would vie to pull the teeth of out each other’s jaws, the one to have all his teeth extracted first being said to ‘lose face’. The true sign of a man’s prowess, therefore, was the number of teeth he still possessed. Legend has it, for instance, that the renowned General Wang retained a full set of teeth till the day he died, with the exception of one incisor that he lost when he committed the tactical error of tasting his wife’s fried rice. The fact that the Western world has chosen to use something as inherently harmless as gunpowder to fight its battles, while actively volunteering for dental work, remains one of the finest ironies of history, one that the ancient Chinese would doubtless have found amusing if they’d ever managed to take the time out from inventing all these other cool things to actually develop a sense of humour.

At any rate. One of the consequences of this noble provenance of the dental arts is that, like everything else that’s imported from China, 85% of the features of dental medicine remain unused in the modern world because they all came written up in an obscure 600 page manual that no one can read because it’s in Chinese. As an aid to budding dentists looking to start up their own clinics, therefore, I offer the following 10 cardinal rules of being a successful dentist, gleaned from years of careful observation of dental techniques:

1. The most important feature of a state of the art dental clinic is the presence of a large collection of woefully outdated and unspeakably boring magazines in the waiting room. Everyone knows that the skill of a dentist is inversely proportional to the readability of his waiting room periodicals, so that if you ever stumble into the waiting room of a dentist who has the current issue of Outlook lying about, you probably want to beat a hasty retreat, while if said waiting room features the 1974 issue of Auto Parts Illustrated then you KNOW that you’re in sound hands, and you might as well have all your teeth taken out and replace them with dentures, because nothing God gave you could be better than what this dentist can do. If you’re a young dentist setting up your own place, and don’t have any great aunts who can lend you their teenage copies of Woman and Home, your best bet is to litter the place with the abstruse neuro-science journals that you used to collect before reality struck and you had to settle for being a dentist.

2. While outdated magazines are critical to setting the right ambience for your waiting room, they aren’t enough. The Ministry of Silly Signs requires that you put up at least one poster showing a full set of shining teeth with the word SMILE written in large letters somewhere on it, preferably with some lame Hallmark type joke underneath. This is important. Failure to comply with this statute could result in your Blockbuster DVD membership being revoked permanently. Notice that the key issue here is smiling – other functions that teeth might conceivably serve are not officially recognised yet, so that if you’re thinking about putting up a poster that says EAT, don’t.

3. The next critical piece of equipment is, of course, the Chair. The purpose of the Chair is to obscure the fact that what you really do is essentially basic manual labour, only with really tiny instruments (I firmly maintain, for instance, that the only reason dentists get paid more than say, hairdressers, is that their chairs are fancier). A good state-of-the-art dentist’s chair doesn’t just recline and shine a light on you, to be truly modern it must be capable of playing Bach Fugues at the press of a foot-lever, able to run complex chaos theory models while the patient rinses his / her mouth, and equipped to fly the USS Enterprise should the need suddenly arise. You’re unlikely to use any of these features on a regular basis, but the fact that you can tell the suction pipe from the karaoke attachment will make you feel less guilty about charging exorbitant rates for what is essentially a process of drilling holes in people’s teeth and filling them up again.

4. If you are a man, becoming a successful dentist means you need to combine the Boris Karloff look with the bedside manner of Frankenstein. Only then will your patients be sufficiently intimidated by you to never refuse to come back, justifying this decision to themselves with the argument that you must be really good if you can afford to be so rude. (Fun fact: Dentist, in Transylvanian is spelled Igor, or would be, if vampires could spell)

5. If you are a woman, being a successful dentist means you have to be young, single and good looking. This is to ensure that the entire procedure is as embarassing and tortuous for your male patients as possible. After all, what could be more frustrating than the knowledge that when they finally meet a woman worth hitting on, it’s in the most unromantic setting conceivable [1], that the first time a woman gently pushes them onto their backs and asks them to open their mouths for her, it’s only so she can clean off their tartar deposits? After that, a mere extraction or two is hardly going to hurt.

6. Always wear a mask. This not only makes your pretense of being a real doctor more convincing, it also ensures that no one can actually see the 26 fillings you have in your own teeth.(thus retaining the molar high ground. heh.)

7. Always wait till you’ve got at least four different implements in your patient’s mouth before you start asking them questions. There’s nothing like making small talk while your mouth is being held forcibly open to make you appreciate the importance of healthy teeth.

8. Tell your patient that he / she has a condition of that kind that is lying dormant now but could suddenly come alive and prove excruciatingly painful if not actually fatal. Go on and on about how terrible this could be. Use words like inflammation and septic liberally. After you’ve got the patient to the point of abject panic, explain to him / her that you don’t actually plan to do anything about it, except wait for it act up. Wave an X-ray at them to PROVE that there’s no other way (Oh, yeah, always get an X-ray done – like your patient’s teeth are hidden so deep within his / her body that you couldn’t see them with the naked eye). This step has numerous advantages: a) it’s more sadistic than making someone watch re-runs of Friends b) it gives you a reason to show empathy, thus enabling you to show off the bedside manner you’ve been practising in the mirror these last 5 years c) it means you can schedule follow-up meetings every few months, and eventually send your kid through college d) if anything does eventually go wrong with the person’s teeth (and let’s face it, it probably will) you can then claim you told them so [2] (this requires, of course, that the initial diagnosis be suitably veiled in medical gobbledy-gook; never say, for instance, that a piece of their third tooth bottom right got chipped off, say something like “you have an infracted sub-accidental presentation of your lower occidental incisor”)

9. Make sure you prescribe a mouthwash or gum massage or some other treatment that will require hours of intense effort after every meal, meeting any whimpers from your patient about having a job / life with a look of shocked outrage. Remember to emphasise that the substances you are prescribing are not to be taken internally, not even in trace elements, because they could lead to poisoning and eventual blindness, leaving it to your patient to figure out how this is to be achieved with something that is being applied to his / her mouth.

10. If all else fails, simply tinker around randomly in person’s mouth, and then show them a mirror and say something like “you can see the difference already”. They almost certainly can’t, but there’s no way they’re going to admit to you that they don’t spend long periods of every day studying their teeth with a magnifying glass. If they do have the temerity to claim that they don’t see an improvement, tell them you could do a more thorough cleaning, but it would require using a local anaesthetic – there’s something about the idea of someone poking a needle into one’s gums that will make even the most stalwart naysayers meekly capitulate.

Notes

[1] I mean seriously, can you imagine a situation less likely to lead to intimacy? How do you even begin to come on to someone who just spent the last twenty minutes staring at the undersides of your gums? Where’s the magic? And what do you say exactly, “You want to catch dinner sometime? And afterwards we could go back to my place and floss?”. Sheesh (and please, no jokes about filling cavities. Let’s keep this clean. And pearly white).

[2] If absolutely nothing ever goes wrong with your patient’s teeth, you can always fall back on Plan B – congratulating them on how lucky they are, as though this were some sort of personal achievement.

The wind comes from the North West, rattling the chain-metal fence like armour and sending a stray newspaper into somersaults of panic. The flag on top of the old high school wags its tail in excited greeting, here and there stray citizens emerge to bow their heads in awe. The wind pays them no attention, preferring to get on with its work, nudging the mist forward like a herd of sheep, sieving the light from the streetlamps through the bare and shaken branches of the trees. These tasks done, it arrives at the train station, whistling in shrill anticipation at the sight of the empty stockyard.

5 am. The station is deserted at this hour. The wind dusts the tracks for fingerprints, blowing a fine powder of snow across it, but the cold metal rail comes out clean. The track alone stands firm against the wind’s urgency, maintaining the formality of its parallels to both horizons at once. Its very presence seems to reassure the landscape, reassert the familiar discipline of distance.

The temperature outside is – 10 C, not counting windchill. Standing on the platform, he tries to keep this fact from seeping in as though it were the cold itself, as though by denying his body the knowledge he could keep it warm. The wind howls all around him, as bitter as sour steel, and tiny patches of ice have sprouted all over the platform like some sort of skin infection. – 10 C! He stares longingly at the platform waiting room, in whose flimsy shelter a small group of fellow-travellers sit huddled together, trying to stay warm. He considers going over to them. It wouldn’t be much warmer, of course, but at least he’d be out of the wind. He takes another look at the group. How miserable they look, how weak, gathered together like mangy cats. He feels a deep nausea rise in his throat at the thought of joining them. No, better to stay where he is, even if it means freezing till the train comes. But when will the train come? There’s supposed to be one every hour starting with this first one, isn’t there? He doesn’t have a schedule. He spreads his legs a little, braces himself to face the cold, trying to ignore the ridiculous ease with which the wind cuts through his overcoat, sowing tiny spiders of chills in his skin.

It isn’t long before the cold starts to get to him. Slowly the tiny ripples of the cold gather into a larger turbulence, the seep of their malice reaching his very bones. He tries walking about to keep the circulation going, but his shoes are new and the ground is treacherous and he is mortally afraid of falling. Besides, movement only seems to make it worse – every time his trousers rub against his thigh, the cold of the fabric is transmitted to his flesh. He grits his teeth and decides to stand firm. He can feel his muscles rebelling against this idea, can feel every successive tremor of the cold passing through him like a shockwave, but he tells himself that cold is all in the mind, really – 99% imagination – all he has to do is stick to strict denial and he should be okay.

Dawn arrives before the first train – the sunrise itself a kind of locomotive, first the distant rumble of light in the sky, then the first sight of the engine coming over the horizon and then the doppler-esque explosion of day barrelling its way into the world. It’s a glorious sight, but he is too cold to enjoy it. By now his hands hurt as though they are trapped in a vise, and a terrible shivering has taken over his body, causing it to quiver like a rubber snake. His teeth chatter uncontrollably and so hard he is afraid something might break. He has never felt this cold before in his life, never endured so intense a hardship. He is starting to feel a bit dizzy and the conviction is growing on him that he has only to relax his vigil and the wind will blow him onto the tracks. At the same time, there is a small part of him that is proud – proud to have survived this, proud to have stood his ground. He has the terrible suspicion that the people huddled around the platform shelter are laughing at him. He must stand firm. He must show no sign of weakening.

When the train finally arrives he is the first one in, sinking gratefully into the first seat that he can find, his body still trembling wildly. In these first few minutes, his brain has been emptied of all cognition, he has become a glorified animal, the hoarding of warmth his only thought. It is now, in this first tortuous taste of heat, that he tastes the full magnitude of what he has suffered, feeling the extremities of his skin melt slowly from numbness to pain. Slowly, as his mind thaws, another thought begins to nag at him, though – something he has forgotten, something the cold has made him overlook. He checks quickly to make sure that he has brought his bag with him. Yes, there it is, lying safe and snug in the overhead compartment. What could it be that he has forgotten? Perhaps he is just imagining it.

It’s the sight of the conductor that finally precipitates the answer in his mind, causing realisation to fall like a fat droplet. A ticket! He forgot to buy a ticket. How unaccountably stupid of him. Now he’ll have to pay a surcharge. When the conductor reaches him he pulls out his wallet, asks how much the ticket will be. The conductor frowns. We don’t sell tickets on the train, the conductor says, you have to buy them on the station. Yes, well, I’m afraid I didn’t. Is there some sort of fine or something I need to pay? Maybe a special fare or something? The conductor shakes his head.

Five minutes later he is out on the platform again, one station down, and the shivering starts all over again. He watches the train pull out of the station, then walks gingerly across the empty platform (there is ice here as well and the wind is stronger) and buys himself a ticket from the vending machine. Another 55 minutes to go before the next train comes. For a moment he stares at the empty waiting room. The idea of waiting inside it tempts him, but something deep inside cries out that a gesture must be sustained if it is to mean anything. There is a lone wooden bench out on the open platform. He walks across to it, sits down. He has a long, long time to wait and the cold is just beginning to take hold.

Flying across continents, he carries the night with him. Travels within it as though it were an element. Stays clear of the searchlight of the sun. In the endlessness of his dark, landscapes are irrelevant, his only lodestar is the tiny pinch of light winking slyly back at him from the wingtip of his plane. The wing itself seems so contrived, so rigidly formal, slicing through the horizon like a paper knife, seperating the inky blue of the sky from the haze of the earth.

The earth broods. That is what he has learnt today. When no one is looking the earth is mournful, almost melancholy. Hiding behind masks of ice that conceal the raw ground of its feelings. It is we humans who try to cheer the earth up, amuse it with our twinkling lights, our tiny witticisms of townships, our belly laughs of cities. And the earth is generous to us, permitting itself to be bemused the way even the most dour faced philosopher will spare a thin smile for a boasting child. But for all its sympathy with us the earth remains unmoved, ready to plunge back into its stoic silences the minute our back is turned.

In his headphones, the sound of Floyd singing Wish You Were Here. So you think you can tell Heaven from Hell. Echoed into the empty sky, the words seem like a challenge, a prophecy – the question piercing something deep inside him. Perhaps there is no Heaven but this, he thinks, perhaps God is nothing but a name we give to the sky’s profounder desolation, unmatched by anything on Earth. Remember Babel, building his high tower in the hope of becoming God? Perhaps God is not dead, only rent-controlled.

How I wish, how I wish you were here. He mouths the words to himself, thinking of those he has left behind. How I wish. But where is here, exactly? Where in this unmappable blankness of his life would he want this other to be? Isn’t it in fact precisely this sense of place that he seeks from the other, so that the real meaning of the song is not that you want the loved one to be where you are, in your here, but rather you yourself want to be in the place that they represent – you wish they were a ‘here’, a ‘now’? We’re just two lost souls living in a fishbowl, year after year. He looks up and finds that the passengers around are staring at him. He must have sung that out loud. He smiles sheepishly at them, turns back to the window.

What is he doing here, anyway, trapped in this cocoon of an airbus, wrapped in a thousand leagues of freezing air? Airbus. What a name, what a restless marriage of opposites. He feels trapped, constrained. He fingers the buckle of his seatbelt, checks his watch, tries to figure out how long it will be before the breakfast service. Everyone’s asleep, the whole cabin plunged into a crypt like darkness. The only other reading light belongs to that girl in the embroidered salwar-kurta he noticed at the airport, who’s sitting all the way across the plane at the window seat opposite his own. She’s gorgeous. Straight, brown, short-cut hair, skin a delicate opal. The whole scene (the dark cabin, the two spotlights trained on him and her) reminds him vaguely of a scene in an Almodovar film; or of Eliot: “Four wax candles in the darkened room / Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead/ An atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb / Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid”. In his younger days he might have tried to strike up a conversation with her, engineered a meeting by the lavatory, exchanged a few pleasantries. By now he knows that this would be a waste of time. He goes back to his book.

It occurs to him that every book is a journey too. You strap yourself in, prepare yourself – this will take a while. You stare through each page as though through a window, watching these landscapes you desire but can never touch unfold under your careful gaze. The book both constrains you and sets you free, fixes you to your place, but takes you across time and memory to destinations you never imagined possible. By the time it ends, you will have arrived at a new understanding, a new perspective on yourself. The world will look different, but also strangely familiar. You will struggle to adjust to the lag that comes from being returned so suddenly to your own time, your own reality. Travelling and reading, the two things everyone puts on their CV, both merely ways to enter into other worlds, escape yourself.

Somewhere in his thoughts an imaginary line is crossed, the one that divides night from day, today from tomorrow, sleep from waking. In his dream he sees a bowl of clear, still water, a bowl of the most delicate porcelain, so meek, so precious. Only he knows that the bowl is dangerous, because it has sold its fragility to the other side, and so become an apparatus of awesome power. Even a child holding it in its hands would have enough strength to flatten a city. He is not allowed to tell this secret to anyone, for to do so would cause the bowl to crack and send the waters of destruction flooding through the world. He watches in frustration as people admire the bowl, finger it, drop rose petals in it. Are they all blind? he wonders. Can’t they see that the bowl has no shadow? He watches in horror as a young woman picks the bowl up in her hands (fortunately her hand is steady and the water does not ripple or spill) walks over and offers it to him. He tries to warn her with gestures, tries to wave her back, but she is insistent, so insistent…

He wakes to find that the air-hostess is handing him a form. He takes it. Stares for a while at the blandness of it, its insistence on facts – names, numbers, dates – all the details that fail to capture him, trapped in their lonely little cells, stranded behind the barred windows of their tiny boxes. Like a crossword puzzle without clues. Nothing quick or cryptic about this. He thinks about this for a while, then pulls out a pen and writes his name in the first space provided. Is not surprised to find that it doesn’t fit.

It was the perfect flight. Check-in didn’t take too long, security was tedious, but I made it through well in time, the flight was on schedule (well, half an hour late, but you know), I managed to get space in the overhead compartment, there were no wailing brats within earshot, the airhostesses were pretty, the food was actually edible, the jazz on the in-flight entertainment was awesome, I had a good book to read (a copy of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty – a present from a friend) I managed to get some really sound sleep, the immigration lines at Newark were surprisingly short – the whole thing was too good to be true.

It was. [1] Apparently, in their diligent zeal to get all the passengers carefully seated and off on time, the Continental Airlines ground staff in Delhi forgot one minor detail – the fact that said passengers also had baggage that was supposed to take the flight with them [2]. So that when the sun rose over New Jersey this morning, it found yours truly standing meekly at the tail end of a line of some 100 irate passengers outside the baggage claims office in Terminal C. Welcome to America. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, but no one said anything about luggage.

One hour of waiting in line and several interminable waits in queue on the relevant 1-800 number later, I was informed (am informed) that all the bags left behind in Delhi are being brought to Newark tomorrow, but that there is no way of knowing whether my bag is among them, so that I’ll have to wait till tomorrow afternoon before they can tell me whether I’m going to get it back or not. I have this swift mental picture of myself as one of those Confederate wives waiting anxiously for their men to come back from the war. I practise saying ‘Ashley, O, Ashley’ in a breathy voice. I want my Mammy. “But tomorrow is another day”, I tell the woman in the call centre. I can tell she doesn’t give a damn.

Why, o why, didn’t I listen to those Indian Classical CDs I bought before I packed them? Ah, well, at least I was my usual paranoid self and insisted on carrying all my books in my hand baggage, so at least I still have those, even if this means not being able to straighten my aching shoulders for a week.

[1] You can talk about all the great comics of the world, but when it comes to sheer timing, no one has a thing on Fate. It’s uncanny the way she always manages to hold off till that precise moment when you exhale, when you allow yourself to breathe easy, before delivering that swift and inevitable kick to the nether regions. I mean, Buster Keaton had nothing on this.

[2] I picture this as a scene from a tacky American Sitcom. A and B turn to each other with broad smiles on their faces. A says, “I think you did a great job with those passengers who were being so difficult”. B smiles and replies, “Thanks. But you were pretty amazing too – I can’t believe you got the luggage loaded so quickly”. A’s brow furrows in surprise “Luggage? What are you talking about – you’re the one who put in the luggage”. B: “Me, of course not, I never went near the luggage section, I was too busy with the passengers. I assumed you must have loaded it”. A: “But I didn’t”. B: “Wait a minute, if I didn’t do it, and you didn’t do it, then who put the luggage on the plane”. Three second pause while they stare at each other in horror. Then laugh track comes on as A and B make concerted rush off-stage. Cut scene. Open to: George, Kramer and random blonde standing at baggage claim window shouting “You did what???”.

He Wonders Whether to Praise or to Blame Her

I have peace to weigh your worth, now all is over,
   But if to praise or blame you, cannot say.
For, who decries the loved, decries the lover;
   Yet what man lauds the thing he's thrown away?

Be you, in truth, this dull, slight, cloudy naught,
   The more fool I, so great a fool to adore;
But if you're that high goddess once I thought,
   The more your godhead is, I lose the more.

Dear fool, pity the fool who thought you clever!
   Dear wisdom, do not mock the fool that missed you!
Most fair, -- the blind has lost your face for ever!
   Most foul, -- how could I see you while I kissed you?

So...the poor love of fools and blind I've proved you,
For, foul or lovely, 'twas a fool that loved you.

Rupert Brooke, 1913

I’m not, in general, a big fan of Rupert Brooke. I find him too old-fashioned, too archaic. This one sonnet, however, remains a personal favourite – not so much for the ‘poetry’ (the verse is clever but hardly moving) as for the fact that it captures a fundamental problem with moving on, the logical flaw at the heart of nostalgia. In order to have fond memories of something you no longer have / are – you must enjoy both the presence of something and its absence – a difficult argument to make unless you take a heraclitean view of the self and argue that the self that enjoyed something in the past is different from the self that is happy to have left it behind in the present. This is not a problem only with relationships, incidentally – it works equally well for childhood keepsakes, former employers, schools, etc.

Though even here Brooke gets it a little wrong, I think. The problem is not so much that in condemning things from our past we condemn ourselves (most of us are comfortable saying that we behaved like idiots once upon a time – the past is always a convenient scapegoat); the trouble is that we may not always want to condemn things that we have left behind. Just because I personally have moved on to something else, does not mean that I don’t value the person I was / the things I had – my old job may not have been what I wanted to spend my whole life doing, but I thoroughly enjoyed it while I was there and have no real regrets about the time I spent there.

This may sound fairly reasonable, but as a point of view it’s pretty much a tight-rope. Say you’re talking about an ex-girlfriend. Talk about her too fondly / praise her too much and people will instantly assume that you still have feelings for her, that you would like to get back together with her and that you’re fairly unhappy with the way things are. They’ll begin to feel sorry for you. They’ll assume that it must be she who dumped you because you’re clearly still in love with her. They’ll monitor your speech closely for signs of lines from Devdas.

At this point the pendulum will swing. You’ll start by insisting that you have no regrets and that you’re quite happy to be out of the relationship. This will be greeted with that pitying, tearful look that says “It’s okay, you don’t have to deny your feelings to me, I understand how you really feel”. Probably the most irritating look in the world. You’ll lose it. You’ll start detailing all the things you hated about her. You’ll go on and on about how irritating she was, how miserable you were, etc. Before you know it, people will be asking you why you’re so bitter about it. You’ll get advice about how you need to get over it, achieve closure, forgive and move on. They’ll give you the horrified look that says – you were in love with this person, how can you talk about her this way now? You’ll think about it and be a little horrified yourself. You’ll start talking about the her good qualities. You’ll praise her. And the whole cycle will begin again.

This cycle is even worse if you happen to be talking to your ex’s new boyfriend. Now it’s not just about you – it’s about him as well. If you praise your ex too much the new BF will be suspicious, he’ll be convinced that you resent his presence in your ex’s life. He’ll watch lynx-eyed for you to try and usurp him. Even a genuine “You’re so lucky!” will be met with indignation – are you trying to say I don’t deserve it? That I’m not good enough? Huh? Huh? Like you were.

Go the other way and talk about how your ex is so lucky to have found someone so great and the new boyfriend will get all defensive of your ex. Excuse me, this is my girlfriend you’re talking about – just because you were a jerk and didn’t get along with her is no reason to badmouth her now, etc. This is the point where you throw up your hands and decide you can’t win.

Which leaves us with the most fundamental question of all. At the risk of miffing people who worship When Harry Met Sally (yes, there are actually people like that) the real question is not whether a man and a woman can ever be just friends (of course they can) but whether they can be friends after they’ve been in a relationship. That’s the one I’m still trying to figure out.

There is a scene in Die Walkure where Wotan, engraged with Brunnhilde for having rescued Sieglinde, comes to punish her, and the Valkyries rise to defend one of their own from Wotan’s wrath.

Halt’ ein, o Vater! Halt’ ein den Fluch!
Soll die Maid verblühn und verbleichen dem Mann?
Hör unser Fleh’n! Schrecklicher Gott,
wende von ihr die schreiende Schmach!
Wie die Schwester träfe uns selber der Schimpf!

Their efforts are in vain however – Brunnhilde is condemned to becoming mortal, and will sleep in a ring of fire until Siegfried comes to rescue her – and the scene ends with the Valkyries raising their voices in a wail of terrible woe for their lost sister.

It’s the scene that first came to mind when I read the news about Birgit Nilsson’s death.

Does the shade of Wagner still move among us, I wonder, a god turned wanderer, condemning those who make his divine music accessible to human ears? Or is Wagner really the anti-Wotan? If Wotan could take an immortal, Brunnhilde, and turn her into a maid, can Wagner take a mortal woman (Nilsson) and turn her into an immortal?

To listen to Nilsson sing is to hear the scale of human ambition, of human emotion. If it is not the voice of gods, it is at least the voice of giants.

We do not need to maintain a moment of silence for Nilsson’s death. Listen. The world is already quieter.

One of my favourite short stories of all time is this episode in Calvino’s Mr. Palomar, where Palomar is strolling along on a beach and comes upon a woman sunbathing topless. Embarassed, he looks away instantly, and keeps his eyes fixed on the sea till he’s safely past her. Thinking about it though, he realises that in a sense not looking at all is as bad as staring openly. So he goes back past her, this time glancing at her in passing but paying her no special attention. Then he figures that by doing this he’s dehumanised her (she’s a woman after all, not some piece of driftwood) and so he goes back and this time looks at her appreciatively and then walks on…and so on. It’s a brilliant story – encapsulating in a few short pages Calvino’s incredible gift for variation, for intimate intelligence, for human comedy.

It’s a story I’m reminded of each time I fly, because I’ve never quite figured out how to act with air-hostesses, especially good looking ones. First I’ll be super-friendly and smile eagerly at them. Then I’ll worry that she’ll get the wrong impression and think I’m some sort of lech – one of those guys who will randomly come on to anything in a skirt. So the next time she comes around, I’ll be all brusque. I’ll sit there reading my book (thus emphasising my hyper-intellectual status) and vaguely look up the second time she says ‘Sir’, not looking at her at all, and taking whatever she’s handing me with a gruff, distracted air. But wait, now I’m just being one of those rude people who are so caught up in their own lives they treat others like their slaves. She’s not a machine, for god’s sake, she’s a person. What I need is a smile that manages to be friendly without being presumptuous, a goodwill smile, the kind of smile that says I respect you as a fellow-citizen in a democratic universe, but otherwise I have no interest in you. I consider addressing her as comrade. I spend the next ten minutes trying to surreptitiously practise this smile behind my raised book.

Then I think, wait – how am I going to explain to her (in this hypothetical conversation I’m now having with her in my head) that I’m not interested in her? She’s going to think I’m gay; worse, she’s going to think I’m married. How do I convey to her that this is not true? When she comes around with the drink service, can I say something like, “My ex-girlfriend (emphasis on GIRL-friend) would have made me have a Sprite with no ice; but I’m safely single now, so I think I’ll have a diet Coke instead”? Is that allowed under FAA regulations? And no, no, that sounds even more like a chat-up line. How do I convince her that I’m not interested in her? Maybe I could add something chatty about how it didn’t work out because I can’t possibly date someone who hasn’t read Sophocles? Do airline stewardesses read Sophocles? Maybe just that bit in Electra? Is it fair to get her hopes up and break her heart that way?

When she finally comes around with the drink service, I smile sweetly and say, “No thanks.” in a kindly voice – thus conveying that I think she’s really attractive, but I have given up on such material pleasures and acquired a zen-like ascetism that does not permit me to either sip orange juice or ravish her in the aft lavatory. Phew! Finally that’s over. I feel like I’ve just ended a serious, long-term relationship (hey! it’s a transatlantic flight, we’ve been together for all of 16 hours – by my standards, that’s marriage). Somewhere out there in the darkness there’s a piano playing ‘As Time Goes By’. I consider scribbling “We’ll always have Air France” on a napkin and slipping it into her hand as I leave.

Obviously, there’s a part of me that recognises that she doesn’t even know I exist, and probably wouldn’t notice if I painted my nose red and made monkey faces at her each time she came over to serve me. The thing is that it’s a long flight and I need to worry about something and it’s either this or imagining what it would feel like if the airplane suddenly burst open and I found myself in free-fall towards the earth (in what the captain helpfully informs me is -45 C) , though still strapped into my seat (remember the whale and the petunias?). So in a way, trying to figure out how to smile at the airhostess is good for me. Still, it’s one of the reasons I’m so much happier flying Indian Airlines – at least with the stout matrons they have as stewardesses there is none of this palpable sexual tension. They know they’re too old for me, I know they’re too old for me, we both slip easily into our aunty-beta roles, and I can just sit back and let myself be pampered.

P.S. Speaking of being pampered, I have this vivid memory of being eight years old and flying back home on a plane by myself. The airline had this special program for young children flying alone – you handed them over to the staff at the check-in counter, and a stewardess would escort them to the plane, make sure they were safely seated and properly taken care of through the flight, and then hand them over to an adult who came to collect them on the other end (my Dad had to sign a receipt that said: Received One Son). I still remember being made to walk across the tarmac to the plane because they pre-boarded me and this was before they had ramps – I felt all special because it was such an adventure and also really scared because I could see all these massive airliners driving about and I was terrified of getting run over. I got unbelievably pampered that day, though. There’s something about an insanely cute 8-year old (believe it or not, I used to be an incredibly cute kid) who is all serious and grown-up and travelling by himself that acts like cat-nip on airhostesses. And every fellow-passenger over thirty.

In which Falstaff goes on another rambling, sentimental and entirely self-obsessed memory trip. In case of feelings of nausea half way through I recommend putting your head between your knees and taking deep breaths. And promise that I shall return to regular programming once I’ve got this out of my system

Day 3

Saturday morning. R is still asleep at 9:30 in the morning (why do all of my friends have this fetish for sleeping late on holidays?) when I slip out to have coffee with a friend. The Barista we land up in is empty at this hour, which is a relief, even though it does mean that my friend and I feel singled out, the wait-staff watching us like vultures, waiting for us to abandon our cups so that they can swoop down on them. I order a double espresso, try to hide my annoyance when the woman at the counter goes into the routine of telling me that it’s strong black coffee, etc. Do they still need to do this? I consider upping the stakes on her by asking if she can make me a quadruple espresso, just to see the look on her face, then content myself by looking at her with utter contempt when she offers me sugar. Real coffee at last! I take a sip and feel the caffeine humming through me, like turning on the ignition and feeling some secret engine inside me come to life.

Meeting done, I return to R’s apartment, to find he’s finally awake. We sit around on his bean bags, chatting about the old days for a while, passing the conversation back and forth between us like a shared bottle of lukewarm beer, Shruti Sadolikar playing in the background. There is little new we have to say to each other – I saw him in New York a few months ago, and we’ve stayed in touch since – but this conversation is its own point, a dialogue as formal as a ritual, as a ceremony, a series of improvised counterpoints, the essential music of companionship.

By two in the afternoon we’re both hungry, and head out to King’s Circle to grab lunch at Madras Café. One plate idli drowned in an ocean of sambar, one dosa, one bisi bele bhaat and two steel tumblers of sugary coffee later, I’m wallowing in a sense of profound satiation. Our route back takes us past Haji Ali, where the sight of the Juice Centre brings back memories of the taste of the year’s first mangoes. Others may wax eloquent about Marine Drive, but for me Haji Ali remains the most emblematic and magical of all Bombay’s seaside drives – this glorious half moon of a road, like a breath of fresh air between the cramped confines of Pedder Road and the tall towers of Worli, a line of black rocks underlining the seas restlessness, waves crashing against them, nipping at the feet of people who walk across to the island shrine, looking as though they walked on water. And the shrine itself, like a mirage in reverse, rising out of this sickle bay as if transported there by some absent-minded genie. And the quiet lapping of waters in the lagoon, the odd boat bobbing in its gentle waters like an oversized cradle.

By the time we get back to R’s place, it’s almost five in the afternoon. R catches up on some work he has to get done, I read for a while, and then we’re off again, this time headed south to catch the Banganga festival, where Chaurasia is playing tonight. Neither of us has ever been to Banganga before, and the directions we’ve received involve turning right after we get to a white wall (which turn out to be surprisingly common) so that we’re a little concerned about getting lost. We make it on time, however, and Banganga turns out to be this rectangular pond (the technical term, our cab driver informs us, contemptuously, is ‘talao’ – but I don’t know how to translate that), with broken stone steps leading down to the water and quaint little temples all around. We pay close attention to these temples because we don’t actually have tickets for the concert and have been told that if you’re not too fussed about actually watching the performance (we’re not – this is Chaurasia, for god’s sake, I’m going to have my eyes shut for the larger part of the concert anyway) then you can sit in one of the temples and hear the whole concert fairly well. As it turns out, however, there are still a few tickets available at the venue, so we find ourselves sitting on the carpeted stone steps that make up the auditorium here, strategically positioned for maximum leg space and a centre view, with R desperately trying to sms the 1500 people he’s invited to come find us in some temple somewhere (when he’s not being a friend of mine, R is one of the most exuberantly social and outgoing people I know).

The venue’s charming enough to look at, but the concert itself is a bit of a wash out. Not that Chaurasia isn’t as brilliant as always (though I have to say this evening is not one of his most inspired performances) – there are points in his rendition of Raga Des where I’m almost in tears and also dying of laughter – but the sound system is the most excruciatingly terrible I’ve ever heard, and for a purist like me there are way too many external noises – ducks quacking in the pond, the clang of temple bells, people’s cell phones going off at regular intervals [1]. This is made worse by the fact that the organisers don’t bother to stop entry to the venue after the concert actually starts, so that for the first forty-five minutes R and I (who thought we’d done a smart thing by sitting with an aisle in front of us, thus ensuring that we would have maximum space to stretch) find ourselves on the edge of a bustling thoroughfare, with people tripping their awkward way past us every five seconds, usually pausing to tread on our toes. This is so distracting that I barely hear the first alaap. Nor are our woes over yet – there’s a half hour respite while everyone sits and listens to the concert in silence, then people start to leave, and the whole process of ‘Ouch!’ ‘Oh, excuse me!’ ‘Sshhhh!’ is repeated all over again, only this time by people on their way out. Sigh.

The trouble, it seems to me, is that the concert is more an event than a performance, so that there are more people here who want to be seen at a Chaurasia concert than want to actually be at one. The result is that I’m surrounded on all sides by a bunch of polythene crumpling, cell-phone wielding, loud-talking cretins. The worst of these morons is undoubtably the Governor of Maharashtra, who, having been invited to light the lamp, decides to leave half-way through the first raga, thus ensuring that Chaurasia’s sublime flute is forced to compete with the gunned engines and beeping horns of his security retinue (who in his right mind would want to assassinate so completely irrelevant a cipher as a state governor anyway?). A special mention must be made, however, of young lady in orange, clearly the girlfriend of one of the zillion press photographers covering the event, who insisted on having a very visual argument with her boyfriend, telling him that she was hungry and wanted dinner and wasn’t he done yet, standing right next to the stage in full view of a few thousand people. Not to forget the lady who delivered the ‘Welcome Address’, which consisted of a series of incoherent poly-syllabic phrases, delivered in a flat monotone, in which she compared Panditji’s playing to the great flute may-stro Gene Pear Rample. Cretins.

Concert over, R and I bitch about it for a while, then head to the Konkan Café for dinner, figuring it’s the only place we have any chance of getting a table in Bombay at 9:30 pm on a Saturday Night (Douglas Adams was wrong about this you know – the final phase of civilised evolution is not reached by asking the question where shall we go for lunch?; the truly sophisticated civilisation is the one where you have to ask – where can we get a table before midnight?). As we plough our way through their non-veg thali (that incredible mango fish!) I find myself savouring both the contrast between this meal and the one we had for lunch, as well as the delicate counterpoint of dry Chardonnay balanced against spicy rasam. By the time we get back to R’s place, we’re both ready to doze off at once, and R’s enthusiasm for his flight the next morning (he’s flying to a certain pretentious metropolis in Eastern India) has completely evaporated, prompting him to reschedule his trip to Monday. I sit gleefully by as he argues with someone at Jet, desperately tries to contact his office travel desk at half past midnight on a Sunday morning, and finally manages to modify all his plans, waiting eagerly for the moment when he puts down the phone and I can tell him this is what he should have done all along.

Day 4.

Sunday morning. My last day in Bombay before I head back to Delhi. R is fast asleep again, so I head over to Bandra to finally meet up with S. S and I haven’t seen each other for a long time now, and a lot has happened in her life since we last met, so we have a lot of catching up to do. Except that some five minutes after I get to her place, her father, remembering that I’m at Wharton, hijacks me into some discussion of knowledge management in the Pharma sector (of which I know absolutely nothing, though that, of course, doesn’t stop me from holding up my end of the conversation and managing to sound intelligent as hell).

Escaping from her house, I promise to meet S later in the afternoon so we can really talk, and head over to St. Andrews auditorium to catch the Akanksha musical in its final performance. All through this trip I’ve been amazed at the way my sense of direction in Bombay has not deserted me – the way I’ve been able to pick the one route that will take me exactly where I want to go, despite not having travelled these roads for so long. I’m particularly impressed by the fact that I manage to make my way to St. Andrews, a feat that requires successfully navigating a series of narrow Bandra side streets and that I was never able to pull off even when I actually lived in Bombay.

The musical is a glorious and touching event for me. It’s not really the sort of thing I would usually have enjoyed – it’s glitzy and loud and pulls all the obvious tricks – but I’m not paying as much attention to the performance itself as I am to the children performing it, these eager, half-familiar faces whose hope and enthusiasm I find, in a bout of uncharacteristic sentimentality, incredibly moving. There is much in this performance that makes me cringe, but there is less to cringe at then their would be in any other school performance, and I defy any group of children, from any socio-economic background whatsoever, to do a finer job. And that, when you consider the conditions these children live and grew up in, is a minor miracle.

Musical over, I have lunch with another friend, this time squeezing into a tiny restaurant sandwiched between Lemon Grass and Pot Pourri that serves the most hideous Punjabi Chinese food I have ever eaten. This is a special treat for me, because if there is one cuisine I miss in the States it is Indian Chinese. You can get good Chinese food in the US, of course, but nowhere else can you get the precise flavour of American Chopsuey or Sweet and Sour paneer (I won’t even begin to talk about Schezwan Idlis). I gorge myself on a Chicken Dragon Sizzler (a delectable concoction that blends aloo ki subzi and rice with cubes of chicken bathed in spicy hot and sour sauce, topping the whole thing off with French fries!), inhaling about 2,000 lung fulls of pungent smoke in the process. By the end of it, I’m not sure if the tears in my eyes are caused by the memory of the musical, my nostalgia for Indian Chinese or pepper.

After lunch, I meet up with S and her fiancé, and we head out to Bandstand to catch the sunset, stopping in a café by the shore (the Barista, as usual, is impossible to find place in) where S orders French fries and I have a cup of black dishwater. Every time I visit Bandstand now, I find it busier, more crowded, and am overwhelmed with nostalgia for the way I first saw it, a deserted stretch of black rocks along the sea, skirted by a ruined path from which phantom steps led off to nowhere. No fancy coffee shops here then – just a broken down looking juice stand, and the shape-shifting hotel at the end of the promenade that is now the Taj Land’s End. That first summer we would spend long hours walking along this deserted road, trying to pay no attention to the couples making out among the rocks, sitting on thrones of black and broken stone talking poetry or walking down to the edge of the water with our jeans rolled up to let the waves wash over our ankles. We thought we were terribly independent and grown-up then, but looking back it feels like we were little more than children, and the promenade itself, undiscovered, unexplored, unexploited, seems like a metaphor for a quieter, more simple time. Looking at it now, the line that pops into my head comes from Wilfred Owen: “To go forever children, hand in hand. / The sea is rising…and the world is sand.”

I get back to R’s place by eight pm, to find he has just got back as well, and has brought a friend along. This friend greets me with a familiar, casual ‘hi!’ and no further introductions are forthcoming, so that I am left with the distinct impression that I’m supposed to know who she is. I have no idea, of course. I study her carefully, trying not to stare. Yes, she does look kind of familiar. Who is she? I toy with the idea that she might be one of R’s four dozen ex-‘girlfriends’, but discard it. Could it be someone we knew back in college? But surely in that case some explanation would have been in order.

After a while I stop agonising about it. Whoever she is, this woman can hold her vodka and appreciates Led Zep, even going so far as to forcibly turn up the volume when R demurs out of consideration for his neighbours. After that, a minor detail like her name is hardly relevant. We proceed to have a pleasant enough evening, my memories of which extend only to the point where I’m pouring my sixth drink and musing on the philosophical implications of being able to fit a square ice-cube into a round glass. Beyond this my recollections are a little hazy, but I’m told that a good time was had by all. When the mystery woman finally leaves, accompanied by loud proclamations from me to the effect that it’s been great seeing her again and we should definitely catch up more often, I turn to R and ask who she was. It turns out she’s a senior of ours from business school, someone I’ve spoken to barely three times in my life before this evening and therefore could not possibly be expected to recognise. I feel less guilty. I have another drink to celebrate. The last thing I manage to do before I pass out entirely is to set an alarm for five o’clock the next morning, the alarm that will send me zipping through the city’s deserted roads in another speeding taxi, getting me to the airport just in time for the flight that will take me away from Bombay, this ravishing mistress of cities, this beloved metropolis, my favourite place in all the world.

[1] To Chaurasia’s credit, he’s entirely unphased by all this, even stopping at one point to attempt an impromptu jugalbandi with one of the quacking ducks.