A House Full of Stories Ep. 27: Crooner by Kazuo Ishiguro

 One of my favorite stories, I did Crooner by Kazuo Ishiguro for this episode. Enjoy! 

The Bilge Master

Thought Catalog 1

 It’s such a small world. This is not because of technology but because of communication. Yet at the same time, it is a very large world with a lot of seas and lands yet to see, places that hide monsters under them if fantasy authors are to be believed and places that hide bodies under floorboards if we believe a certain someone who is scared of ravens.

Yet there is music. There is science. There is nature and there is the Aurora Borealis. I want to see them all. A friend of mine took a bus to Paris playing Dearest Esmeralda on loop and now I want to go to Romania playing Oasis on loop, or maybe Green Day’s Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).

I do not know what the point I am trying to make here is. Maybe it is a reminder that I am young and I am taking myself too seriously. Maybe it is a reminder that it is time to stay up with myself all night and save my own life.

I’m reminded of a morning one day when I was a chid and the Sonodyne was still working and I had my first cup of authentic South Indian filter coffee (or as some people like to call it, filter kappi, and oh God I wish I had a cup of that sinful fluid by my side right now!) and we opened up a record and I said I wanted to put it on the player and switch it to play. We chose Rubber Soul and my mother played Norwegian Wood and Nowhere Man twice. When I read Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, I found the book quite good and the fact that it had the song as a major part of the narrative was what sold the book to me.

I wonder how good I’d be behind the counter at a book shop. I went to Blossoms and sold A Farewell to Arms to this literature student and all it took was one quote to get that (as my friend Abhijith Menon would say), seismic shift in her eyes. She left the shop with the book. I left it with A Moveable Feast and some other titles.

I know this is random and that’s because my mind is not very settled right now. This is a form of therapy. I want you all to know I’ve stared a journal and the reason you have not had stories on the channel for a while is because I’m planning a double whammy for next week because it is Halloween coming up!

Before I sigh and sign off, I want to say that I appreciate the support of all of you.  FLTM would not be what it is without you.

 

The Bilge Master

Love Disappointed

 

“They say that anger is just love disappointed

They say that love is just a state of mind”

~The Eagles

 

I set out to look for love on a rainy day in September, dressed in my Sunday best and I thought I had found it when I knocked on your door. I was confident that the door would open and that I would be welcome to share a part of your life. I was not wrong.

The door opened into a hallway littered with mirrors. I could see myself from all angles and in all kinds of odd shapes. I was a dwarf in one mirror and a giant in another. I was fat. I was slim. The list goes on. You were there too, flitting between the mirrors- a red glimpse at the corner of my eye, that made me turn around, only to be faced by yet another distorted image of my own figure.

But it seemed to me that in my quest to find you, I had forgotten me. It seemed as if I had forgotten how much I enjoyed my own company, curled up in bed on a winter morning with a book, or cooking like a madman in the kitchen because I’d told my father I wanted to surprise him. I’d forgotten how my gut would tell me when to add salt to the chicken, or overcook it ever so slightly.

I’d forgotten how calming it all was.

And so, I gave up trying to find you and instead focused on finding me. I found a version of me that would never have been able to come to this decision. Had I made you up? Were you only a figment of my imagination? Were you akin to what O’Henry wrote in The Pendulum about how Katy was as necessary as the air John Perkins inhaled- necessary and yet scarcely noticed?

Was I someone in an Ishiguro story? Maybe I could be the man trying to save his marriage by going to Venice with his wife? Except even that didn’t work, did it?

So maybe the thing I should really love is my solitude and the friends that help me deal with that solitude when it gets too much?

Maybe, one day I shall stand atop a cliff and photograph the sea hundreds of feet below me. Maybe one day I shall go somewhere in Paris and decide that this is where my journey ends

Maybe none of this will happen and maybe I’m asleep? Maybe the alarm will wake me soon and I’ll find the dog slobbering over my bedclothes while you make coffee for me in the kitchen which is smelling of bacon fat?

I wonder…

 

Drops of Jupiter

 "Now that she's back in the atmosphere 

With drops of Jupiter in her hair, hey hey hey hey"

Train, Drops of Jupiter

You know you’ve grown up when one day you realize someone you loved won’t be around anymore and the things about them that made them them, slowly start fading; little by little, until their memory starts getting filled with gaps. You then turn to photos to try and remember a time when they smiled, and how much they smiled and giggled when reading PG Wodehouse. You want to go to the bookshelf and pull out the Wodehouses and smell them, for their smell resides in the book, and the smell is not just a smell, it is a redolence that triggers something in you, bringing them back, however fleetingly.

What you wouldn’t give for one more hello.

You know you’ve grown old when you realize that sometimes other people are not on the same energy signature as you are and therefore, no matter how painful it may seem you walk away. Love songs that seemed to be about a certain person now seem to be about a totally different person whom you met while surfing in a spider’s web. You don’t need much, just someone to talk to, but not just anyone and not just about anything.

You know you’ve grown up when you realize accountability. Some things are your fault. Some things you do need to work on and improve. If you’re lucky, the friends you make and the other people in your life will help with this, but even so some roads are meant to be walked alone.

You know you’ve grown up when you’re a year older, somewhat wiser, but somehow the opening sequence of Batman: The Animated Series is still a source of comfort. Sometimes that is all it takes really. A good book, a rooftop, a cooling cup of coffee and all the stars above you looking down at you, brightest among them the North star, guiding you.

And in those stars, if you look close enough and the light pollution is low, maybe just maybe, you’ll see them too. Maybe, just maybe, they’re the reason the North star exists, so that those memories with gaps in them become whole again.

Funny thing death.

The Bilge Master