A Little Bit About Video Games

 

We’ve all heard stories at some point in our lives have we not? Some have appealed to us and some have not.

Every year for my birthday I buy books and have books gifted to me. My entire family have been readers and most of my close friends are readers. This would be interesting, I know but so far it is nothing you haven’t heard before, especially if you’re a library mouse like me.

Stories can be told in many ways. As Neil Gaiman said, “We owe it to ourselves to tell stories”. And with that let me come to a medium of story telling that allows the person the ability to interact with the story.

I’m talking about video games. I recently started playing again, and I found so much of growth in how the story of the game has changed. I’ve grown up playing Age of Empires and then along came Assassin’s Creed which led me around the world, sometimes dropping me in Italy, other times in the Caribbean as a pirate and rendering gorgeous worlds to explore, to dig up secrets and to make the most of what I had on my plate or in my toolkit.

I’ve been allowed to live the lives of assassins, of Jedi Knights, of archaeologists and of wizards and elves to name just a fistful. The plots have been sci fi, fantasy, military, some borrowed from anime, some games inspired by anime and most of the games I’ve been playing are brilliant.

I wonder what would happen if Neil Gaiman wrote a game. George RR Martin has written Elden Ring and that is a fantastic game.

I can only wonder what new adventure awaits me every time I boot up a game and start moving my mouse around or holding down the walk forward key.

And not just that, I have found that sometimes you need to relax your mind after a long day when all you’ve wanted to do was kill your boss, so kill a drug dealer in a game instead. As long as you don’t allow the lines to be blurred or crossed, you’re fine.

Anyway, this is me saying that video games have meant and continue to mean a lot to me. As a writer, some of the stories I’ve witnessed in a game have ended up as a Chekov’s gun somewhere in an article or a poem or something. I can only hope that games come up with more worlds to explore and more stories to witness.

And I’d like to close with a very favourite quote of mine:

“Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock and roll” ~ Shigeru Miyamoto

The Bilge Master

I Will Not Go Gentle

 I was recently reading this article where Neil Gaiman talks about how Terry Pratchett is not jolly, he is angry. I have hyperlinked the article here. It isn't a secret to anyone who has visited my blog that I am a bibliophile and like books more than people. But of late , I've been struggling and reading this article put a lot of things into perspective for me. 

Gaiman writes,

"I rage at the imminent loss of my friend. And I think, “What would Terry do with this anger?” Then I pick up my pen, and I start to write."

I felt every word of that sentence. For me writing has been an escape, be it jotting down quotes from books or peopling my walls with quotes and posters  the written word has always been my friend. I know few other ways of expression than writing, for even the photos I take have either lyrics as captions or writing that is purely original.

I also agree with Gaiman when he says that anger is an engine. But like all engines, anger can cause failures and hurt the people who care for you. I know there are things I do in anger which I regret later, but when doing them I feel a sense of pride and justice is being served, that i have been wronged and now the world owes me blood. It is this thought that scares me the most. At the moment, there are two wars raging in the world, both due to anger, people are dying and an entire generation has been wiped out. Anger isn't doing anyone good here.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that in time, and I hope that time comes sooner rather than later, I will adapt into the process and accept my anger, not as a tool for revenge but as a motivator to get things I need to get done, done. 

As for those of you who have felt hurt or have been hurt by my anger, know that I'm trying..I really am.

I do not want to be an angry person, I was made into one. But that anger has made me kind, it has gifted me with a stubborn nature and since I know what I do not want, I know that I shall get what I do want.

Thank you for reading this, if you stuck around this far.

The Bilge Master

Converting "Could" to "Should"

 “To be or not to be, that is the question”, is a quote that everyone is familiar with in some form or the other. For me personally, this quote asks an important question, viz- “Could it happen?” and follows it up with one of the most interesting questions I’ve ever come across- “Should it happen?” This brings me, in my usual roundabout way to the discussion I hope to have with you as you pursue this article, a discussion on the word “speculation” and specifically, speculative fiction.

 Could dragons exist? Should time travel be possible? Is there alien life and could someone be trying to establish contact with us, or are we alone?

 The above paragraph are the questions a tween me kept asking my father, one of the most accomplished engineers I have ever seen. These questions were born of the fire in my belly which was ignited when I read Isaac Asimov for the first time and in particular his short story “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”. The Three Laws of Robotics fascinated me- how could you create a machine capable of being able to obey laws, of existing to serve or to carry out tasks that humans could do? Could this machine love? Could this machine know hate? Could this machine…? Should this machine…?

 Anyone who has been following the news or checking social media is aware of the SAG AFTRA controversy and I for one, (as an amateur writer) find myself strongly in the camp of those on strike. I am elated that their terms ended up being met. But it prompted in me the desire to pen this, (on a word processing software, to be uploaded to a server hosted under Google’s umbrella. Yes, I am aware of how sci fi I sound, of how speculative fiction-ish I sound, of how dated I sound and of how abnormal this would seem to someone from the past).

 Humans are a remarkable species and their imagination knows no bounds. Since the discovery of fire, and the invention of the wheel, humans have never looked back. All of us at some point, have wondered about the lines at the top of this post- and some of us have been influenced by them, and created- converted the could to the should and in doing so made room for more could.

 I am often told engineers are not creative and am painfully aware of the rivalry that exists betwixt science and the arts.  My only statement here is that everything you see around you was once nothing but lines on paper. Everything. Let that sink in for a bit.

 Here is the thing see, here is why according to me, we need to keep converting could to should- we need to keep creating, we need to keep being curious and we need to keep learning without fear. Rabindranath dreamt of a utopia in his poem and said as much- “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high/Where knowledge is free” …

 

And to think that this writeup was inspired by a simple list of books, all of them falling under speculative fiction and suddenly some cog in my brain started to turn and now here we are, 550 odd words into this rant and I don’t even know what I’m saying at this point and so I’ll just leave you with a little T.S. Eliot

 

“Do I dare disturb the universe?”

 The Bilge Master

 

Another Day

The fields are burning again

There is no food, no rest, no kind touch on my fevered brow 

There is just silence, as if a vacuum has covered up the world 

There is a man in the corner 

His lips move frantically, he is pleading 

But the entity he is praying to no longer exists 

Not here, no

For here is where we go to die

Here is where angels forsake us, they fall 

Here is where God's disgraced son holds court 

Here, the currency is sin and the richer you are, the blacker your heart

Upon the burning plain, they march

A horde of demons, a reminder of sins you committed in the past 

What is your future, you ask? 

You? You who are imprisoned here think you can make demands? 

You are naught but hollow, naught but a husk 

You used to be human, now you're a disgrace 

Abandon all hope, for hope has no place here

And the louder you scream, the longer you stay

Round and round the mulberry bush you go

Day after day after day

The Bilge Master

The Return of the Little Prince

 There's a certain romance in knowing that there's one last train that can take you home, where your love lies waiting. But consider this, what if your love was not one, but many. As Zafon said in The Shadow of the Wind, there are worse prisons than words, and sometimes the prisons we build are the ones where we are busy with matters of consequence.

And if into this mixture, we introduce a child, what then? Let us consider this child. Pick up a pencil and make a Drawing No 1 for me please. Good, A box. Very good. I see the matters of consequence have not made their way into our relationship yet, and if we are lucky perhaps they never will.

So let me tell you about something today. Let me tell you what I saw in a child's eye the other day. I saw a tear, a tear of pain, for the child had lost its way. The child had wanted to reunite with a person, intending to befriend him, to recognize him again and having recognized him to acknowledge him. But this person, stuck in a loop regarding those infuriating matters of consequence did not even look up from his ledger.

Why do we forget we were children? Why do the adults in our lives make us doubt ourselves? Neurodivergence is a large word to speak of, but an easy word to understand in reality. When we are children, our curiosity makes us be able to befriend such big words, to sit with them and not be imprisoned by them. It is tragic that as we age, we change. We consider words prisons and we consider that there are worse prisons than words. There is a child to be comforted in all of us, if we could look up from our aeroplanes and understand that we are responsible for what we have tamed.

The thing about having a wounded child inside you is that the salve for that wound comes from places you'd least expect succour from. The child you once were may one day meet another such child, only this child he or she or they met may not have these matters of consequence bog them down. But was it easy for this person to remember how to be a child again? More often than not, it is one of the most difficult of journeys. There's so many things about ourselves we wish we could change- our clothes, our hair, parts of our body, the books we read, the people we love, who we wish more than anything will love us back.

Yet, all is not lost. Sometimes we meet children in the guise of adults. Children whom the inhabitant of Asteroid B-612 has visited and spoken to of roses, and in speaking to them of roses, reminded them that although there are many such flowers in the world, the fact that they gave time to one such flower is all that matters really in the grand scheme of things. 

Every year, I turn older. Every year, for years on end, I read about the inhabitant of Asteroid B-612. It is because of The Little Prince that I have met my best friend, it is because of him that I have learnt that sometimes all it needs to free oneself from a prison is to look outside the window, to see children playing football in a park, or to pick up a harmonica and make music. 

Maybe, just maybe, the matter of consequence is that the Prince has come back from his star and has brought you something you can tame? Maybe that landscape you go to when you are feeling lonely is no longer vacant? Maybe the face you see in the mirror wants you to know, that no matter what and no matter where there is always time to make a Drawing No 1 again.

A piece I wanted to write for a very, very, very long time. This pertains to the novella Exupery wrote called "The Little Prince", and it is a tribute to the people I have met because I read it, the people who remind me that a hat is a boa constrictor who has eaten an elephant. And to them, I just have this to say- thank you for taming me!

The Bilge Master

Where Is My Mind?

The boy woke up from yet another nightmare in the hospital and found the sun was shining outside. It was early enough for the first tea of the day that the inmates were served. He grabbed his book and headed out for chai which was served to him hot and sweet and milky.

It has been four years since this incident and so much has changed in the boy's life, but for some reason he frequently visits this place in his dreams, before the dreams turn darker and darker and like the Cohen song, its like a million candles are burning but there's no help coming. He knew he had to get out of that hospital but he came back to an empty house. The spirit of the person who occupied his thoughts and motivated him to undergo haloperidol withdrawal had long since gone. Truth be told, she was gone in 2002 and what was left was a diseased mind in a plump shell, addicted to Xanax and cigarettes. Next came the blame games, the ones where she lied to his friends.

It should have ended the day he burnt her corpse and did his duty by her, but somehow the next segment was waiting for him behind the hallway door. Unlike most exorcisms, this demon was going to take a while to erode out of his psyche. His medicines were changed and he could not hold down jobs for very long. However, every time he tried to stop fighting, a Terry Pratchett quote kept staring at him out of the corner of the wall of his room. 

"It was sad music, but it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could, but you were still alive."

A few months on, more quotes joined that one on the wall such as this one from a Roald Dahl short story:

"I think the reason I do not want to die is because of the things I hope will happen."

Finally, Liam Gallagher came to his rescue, and the lines from his song, Too Good for Giving Up adorned the space above his desk. 

"Tomorrow's waiting down the line \

It's getting late but there's still time 

You're too good for giving up 

Look how far you've come 

Stronger than the damage done"

It is not an easy task to eradicate your primary caregiver from your life, my dear friend, and many have told him to try and move on, to put it behind him. Most nights however, the daemon of hatred rears its ugly head. He tells himself it is just a dream, but then he is reminded of how when the soul reaches the banks of the river Styx, the boatman Charon will ferry them across to the Underworld and he knows she left to go on that journey, but it is as if the spirits of her pollute the air he breathes.

He told me the other day over drinks, that he wishes to move on. I told him he has made strides in that direction, that the posters in his room are proof of that and that in time, although the wounds may never heal, he will find a way to accommodate both she who is dead, he who is alive and himself wh ohas all his life ahead in the same mind.

It's like the Rise Against song,

"We've all been sorry 

We've all been hurt 

But how we survive is what makes us who we are"

The Bilge Master

Caught Somewhere in Time: Of Battered Paperbacks

 I've always been one of those people who stay up late reading and I'm currently reading Shibumi. The copy I have is a secondhand one, possibly stolen by my father from a library. And earlier today, as I was  heating up dinner, I happened to encounter a spirit in my house, a harmless one that stopped by to say hello and is now nestling in the bookshelves, possibly reading Isabel Allende.

I have been seeing ghosts and reading paperbacks since I was a child. I have scribbled stories about them on paper, on napkins and now on digital canvases like this blog. There are plenty of paperbacks in this house and plenty of memories about the people to whom those books belonged to as well. 

There is a certain charm to opening a volume and seeing my grandmother's scrawled dedication in it to me. Off the cuff, I remember my copy of Asterix the Legionnaire has a dedication scrawled on it. The pages have turned yellow now though.

It makes me think sometimes, like an itch in the back of my head that I can't seem to scratch: Is a book I found in a shelf in my house there for a reason or by accident? Is it a book my father liked but my grandmother adored? Is it a book my mother hated and I worship?

This house is full of memories in the form of books. It is caught somewhere in time, smelling of vanilla essence and freshly made coffee and in it lives a reader and his father, silently reading. 

There is something curiously intimate about this house and it has a library that records the people that came to stay in it, the people whose memories and whose future can be found in the books it has in it.

The Bilge Master

A Conversation With the Child in Me

 I’ve heard it said often that children can’t wait to be adults and that adults wish for their childhood back. It’s a strange conundrum indeed. So, I thought about asking the child inside the adult that I am if he wanted to be a child again. Allow me to walk you through the answer he gave me. 

He said he remembered quite a few things about his childhood. He remembered his soft toys Khepi and Halum Sheikh, a stuffed doll, and a stuffed lion respectively. He said he remembered his mother cooking lemon chicken and he remembered reading Uncle Fred in the Springtime on the school bus and in between classes.

The adult me however has a different series of memories about these incidents. Uncle Fred in the Springtime becomes Thank You, Jeeves in my narrative, the pressure cooker cooks not lemon chicken but traditional Bengali kosha maangsho (meat curry) and my mother, well she’s dead now.

The child in me is confused. Dead? But ma had promised she would be around to see me married! She would be there to welcome her first grandchild. How can this be? This can’t be true! Tell me how I can stop it, future me! Please! 

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his father changed too. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that the Maruti 800 became a Maruti 1000 and then a Ford Fusion or that he would change schools and he would see the city change and that his beloved grandmothers would also die. Just then, he interrupted my soliloquy and burst in

Hey. You! What about our father? What happened to him? Is he okay? What happened to our car? 

Well kid, we got a dog! The Ford was the car he rode around in and his name was Chuni and we called him Chuns, you and me. He was the light of our lives until one day he was called back to where he came from. I should also mention that we learned how to drive that Ford and a very attractive woman in an Audi raced us down NH2. 

So, you see kid, we don’t have it all bad. There is a lot of good! We meet with artists; we take photos. We go on a solo trip to Delhi and we finally get to read about Bruce Springsteen. Remember that guy? Dancing in the Dark? Yeah, him! We find his book in the future! 

I don’t know how to tell the child in me that as I grew older, my mother grew old with me and changed, that I changed. I don’t know how to tell him that Khepi is no longer a toy I like to play with, that Neil Gaiman has taken the place of Aesop’s Fables and that I’ve broken a girl’s heart and had my heart broken as well. As for the chicken, I cook it now.

But come on! yells the child in me. Now he wants a fight with me. How could you become like this? What changed? Is this what I become? Motherless, lost, confused?

No, I whisper, holding him close and rocking him gently. You become the writer of a blog that has tens of thousands of views. You meet people who want to be in your life, who love you. You grow up into the sort of man who shops for his father, just as his father shopped for him. You possess the confidence to leave jobs and get new ones. You have to understand just one thing, you’re still you. Inside me is you. And I love you, I  have always loved you.

Yes, you feel scared and lonely and the women you fall in love with seldom are the right ones for you. But on the other hand, women tell you that they feel safe around you. You’ve started to explore more with your writing, you know what you want to read now and guess what? It isn’t the classics! So, come on kid. You’ve got this journey to go on. Start travelling to meet me. 

I am you and you are me. Together, we can take the world. Maybe one day, you’ll look back on this exchange of thoughts and wonder why you were worried about becoming an adult to begin with! And maybe one day, when I’m old and gray, I’ll dig out this exchange of thoughts and tell my younger selves that growing old isn’t that bad a thing to do.

The Bilge Master

"Take me where the angels fall"

 When I was five years old, I got glasses. My world changed. My eyes were imperfect see? The glasses were as well. They had a shelf life and the lenses used to get scratched, the frames used to suffer wear and tear, and over the years the frames I've worn have changed. I've changed the shape of the frames, I've changed the colour to just name two aspects.

We keep saying that change is the only constant in our lives. We all change. We change when we get a good grade in class. We change when we get a new job. We change the combination of clothes we wear each day. I don't go to work in a pair of flip flops, just as I don't go to a movie in formals. But, I got to thinking why change is important. 

There's so much imperfection all around us. Have you noticed it? The laptop I'm writing this on has a faulty right arrow key. This blog I write has seen change in the quality of what's been posted on it. Everything I've posted on it is imperfect, because if it was perfect there would be no need to write a new post. One post would seal this blog's fate permanently. Vincent Van Gogh is considered the greatest artist in the world and his life was imperfect. He was mentally ill, due to circumstance and his best friend fought with him. Out of those imperfections came some of the most breathtaking art this world has seen, art that is worth billions now. 

By the way, as I wrote the previous sentence, I modified it from "Art worth billions now" to "Art that is worth billions now", adding a comma and thereby increasing the length of the previous sentence. There are so many ways that this post is imperfect, so many key strokes that have gone in to take it to where it is now and so many more keystrokes before it is complete. It takes a lot of effort for me to write, it isn't seamless and flowy all the time. I've taken to pausing, to re reading some parts, snipping off this and that and maybe coming back to a word or a phrase, putting it back in, taking it out again...this blog post's creation is constantly in flux (and I'd initially wanted to write that "This blog post's creation is a constant...", when I suddenly thought the current iteration sounded better).

Love is again one of the most imperfect things in this world. There are so many different ways we are given love. Love is multiple things. You love something but it can drive you crazy, maybe you love it because it drives you crazy. Maybe the love I got as a child was too much. Maybe as I grew older, I demanded a different sort of love and my parents couldn't keep up with that. My mother died in 2021. She had a sad life, a fucked up life where she battled depression and she lost the battle. For almost the entire time I knew her, I loved my mother, but every day that love would grow a little less and I would love something or someone else a little more.

I never understood why my mother was depressed. I have two or three different memories of my mother. One version of my mother is smiling, clad in a saree I bought her, chatting with my friends about why they don't have girlfriends. Another version of my mother is the frustrated and angry one, asking of me that which I have no way to give her. Another version of my mother is the one lost in a fictional world, a world whose colour scheme was something only she knew. 

As I have journeyed through life, I have met a lot of people. Some of those people can't stand the sight of me anymore. Some of those people never gave up on me and some of those people see good in me on days I don't. None of those people are perfect, each one is just doing the best they can. 

Every single construct we've made is imperfect. Why else would there be 11 iterations of Windows and the sure knowledge that every few years there would be another Windows coming out? Why else would there always be new and changing technology? I chose to study engineering and what I was taught in college on a Monday in 2013 inevitably changed by Friday in 2017. Again, (and my mother would hate that I'm being repetitive), change is the only constant.

But, one thing hasn't changed yet. Curiosity. The fuel that is consumed in our search to make that which is imperfect into that which is perfect is our curiosity. I teach a child science. You should see her curiosity. Her favourite word in my classes is "Why", and I think that's the most powerful word in the English language. 

Why write another book? Why change an archaic law? Why build a robot? Why give up? Why change? Why not stop a while to appreciate how imperfect you are? Why not look for someone who loves the imperfect you, because that imperfection is what makes you who you are? 

Maybe even God as we know God is imperfect? 

We can't escape being imperfect you see. We can only try to make as many mistakes as we can, learn from the mistakes we've made so as to grow as humans and accept that life goes on. There's a gig in the sky we are all attending one day, and who knows maybe the ticket to attend it is to finally become perfect, and leave this imperfect world behind...this imperfect world that is so vibrantly, unapologetically and beautifully not giving up on its search for perfection and giving us one day after another to become better, to keep trying keep living and learning.

Here's to being imperfect, and here's to being caught in a landslide in a champagne supernova in the sky!

The Bilge Master

"I saw your face in a crowded place and I don't know what to do"

 As a patron of the metro rail system in my city and other cities such as Delhi, I've seen my fair share of beauty in the coaches. The cute couple that just started dating and only have eyes for each other and the elderly who sit in the Senior Citizen seats and talk about the days of their youth when the Metro either extended to Tollygunge or didn't exist at all.

And as I'm travelling, book in hand or earphones blasting James Blunt, I sometimes see a spectre loom over me, winged and black and ominous, wearing a double breasted suit. I know who it is, it is my guardian angel in some ways.

The other day I saw a play at Gyan Manch called Eka Ki..? (Alone...?) which was performed by Ankur (follow them on Instagram @ankur_kolkata_official). It was a play set in a college which brought me back to my college days and it was about the personification of a person's loneliness. It got me thinking a lot about how lonely a person can be, even in a crowd of people...how alone social media has made us in the attempt to make the world a smaller place.

Every morning, I wake up and open my WhatsApp and Instagram to check what my circle is doing. This circle is wide- Delhi, Kerala, Darjeeling, Assam, Romania, USA, UK and then there's the celebs I follow as well. After getting my social media fix, commenting or liking some posts and reading a few good comics and seeing some jaw dropping photos, I either go to work wherein I listen to a podcast or music on Spotify and (you guessed it!) my spectre looms somewhere over my right shoulder as we're travelling. I'm always online in some ways, I'm always keyed in to the Internet and what that does is cause the spectre to loom more and more. 

So one day, I took off my Bluetooth headset and I went to a chai shop and I asked the spectre to sit down. bought it a cup of tea and I asked it what it wanted. 

It whispered that it was me, the part of me I was trying to shove away, the part of me I was trying to bury. I saw it start to cry. It told me it had never known a day when I had not summoned it, be it when I was a child and lost myself in books to escape it, or played violent video games because my mother had picked another one of her fights for no goddammed reason with my father and they were locked in World War III in the next room, or my "friends" in high school had as usual bullied me and were jealous of my vocabulary. The spectre said it had seen me grow into a fine man but it had never left my side. It was the Julio in my life and it had waited all my life down by the schoolyard. 

And then it started to scream. Why was I fighting something that was a part of me? Was it so hard to accept it? Why was I trying to segregate it? Why? Why? Why? 

Isn't that all of us at some level, especially if we are intelligent? My father has been lonely, my teachers have been lonely, my doctors have been lonely, my friends are lonely.

Why you ask?  I think deep down every person on this planet has a core of loneliness and they turn to art to dissipate it. I write, I read, I listen to music and podcasts and I talk.

And it was at this chai shop that I was at, sipping tea with the spectre that I came to understand this. 

We're all lonely people deep down. But I think that, rather than fight something that's such an integral part of us we should have some chai with it now and then.

And then, I put my small earthenware cup of chai down and I stood up. I extended my hand to the spectre and shook it. The spectre looked into my eyes and smiled. I smiled back.

As I walked back, Blunt came on the playlist again...

"You're beautiful

You're beautiful

You're beautiful, it's true"

The Bilge Master

Of Buses

 So I've joined a new office and it has been three months now. It is about an hour by road from where I live and I normally travel there by bus. This is a small article about my experiences on the buses I travel on. 

I remember my senior in college telling me once that he loves to travel on buses because he gets to see a lot of things, listen to a lot of songs and oftentimes the conductors make cheerful conversation with you as you stand (or sit) in the bus. At the time, I was not a surface traveler and was traversing the underground metro rail network to get from place to place. That in itself was an experience about which I've written a lot and will write again maybe, but let's focus on buses for now as Anjan Dutta croons at me from my Spotify.

So, the experience of traveling on a bus can be summed up in two situations- do you get a seat or don't you? If you get a seat, and it's a window seat you get to watch the world go by you in a slight blur as the bus accelerates or in a slight crawl as the bus slows down. If you get a seat, you also can dive into a book and read a short story which is what I do on the Barasat-Baruipur on my way to work. So far, I've read some O'Henry, some Russian folktales and am now reading a science fiction omnibus which has some interesting stories. I've also found that switching to my father's old Jabra Talk bluetooth device has helped me enjoy music on low volume while travelling and frankly the lack of a wired earphone helps a lot, because wires have a mystical habit of getting tangled or torn in crowded buses. Just this morning, I listened to the Indian Ocean song "Kandisa" on loop while reading Asimov's short story in the omnibus (The C Chute). 

On the other hand, traveling back from the office on a bus is a tactical ball game. The office crowd tends to be large and while the essential travel is cheap, it is because it is cheap that the buses are usually crowded. So, the tactic is- get on, struggle to find a place to stand in peace, keep ten or twelve rupees handy in an easily accessible place, put your bag on the bunker and sway to the rhythm of the bus. This journey may allow for music, but rarely does it allow for reading.

So...a morning spent reading and an evening of swaying back to the homestead is what the general picture is. However, there is a queer sense of belonging in the bus. Making way for people, hurling abuse at an irritating element, interesting conversations with the driver or the conductor (dependin gon where you are in the bus and how crowded it is), and the almost miraculous mathematical algorithm by which you approximate the rate of influx and efflux of people in the bus, and if it's safe to sit down on a vacated seat (if you're fast enough), or when you have to mve out of  a person's way...sometimes physics can be a cruel mistress and leave you gasping for air due to the sheer number of people in the bus, and sometimes the bus is empty in the evenings as well! 

Then of course, we must talk about the regularity of the buses. An S9C from Sector V (my office) leaves the main T junction at 6:40PM and because it was a Saturday yesterday, I managed to get on and had a semi smooth journey home. On the other hand, if I miss the 8AM Barasat-Baruipur, my commute to office becomes a challenge because of the time factor involved. Also let the court note that, I've usually managed to find a seat on the 8AM bus from home. 

And sometimes, I've met people on the bus with whom I've had interesting chats while traveling about myriad topics- the weather (there was a heatwave in Kolkata recently), boyfriends, music and books to name a few topics. 

Indian Ocean bled into The Local Train by the way and now I'm listening to Lucky Ali. So as I wrap up this post, let me just say that it's a mixture of tactics, luck and merriment to ride a bus on my commute to office. Quirky? You bet! 

(Attached below is an Indian music playlist I made on Spotify)

The Bilge Master

"Coz maybe, you're gonna be the one that saves me"

I turn another page of the book I am reading and suddenly I am five years old and my first book is in my hand as is a glass of milk that my mother insisted on making me drink. 

Another page and I am lounging in my great grandfather's chair- it's 8AM on a Sunday and that means luchi and alu-r torkari for breakfast, cooked by a maid who has since then left our employ because she fell in love and married for love, got thrown out of her house for her trouble and unlike Bruce Springsteen's brother in law found out the hard way that love is indeed a camouflage for what resembles rage. Perhaps it will take more than fifteen thrashings and the usual drunken babble of how she can't satisfy her husband who wanted a sizeable dowry, to convince her that she was better off working for us, while my mother taught her English, slowly and steadily. Perhaps that would have allowed her to get a job as a receptionist and become independent of the patriarchial society she was an unwilling part of.

Another page and I'm 22 and the world is my oyster. I hate oysters by the way, but I seem to be an expert at falling in love. My latest crush is a girl who studies in a certain college, is as tall as I am and can be seen walking a Labrador in my compound and smoking a cigarette that she palmed from her father's jeans pocket- always Silk Cut, but obviously not Johanna Constantine. 

Another page, and another and another. The spell has taken hold. I feel like Hemingway felt in that cafe in Paris, where he said that all of Paris belonged to him and he belonged to the notebook and pencil in front of him, just as he said that beauty belonged to him and him alone, he had seen beauty's face.

Suddenly, I want to write what I'm feeling right now. Suddenly I am in the grasp of a story, gliding along on a river in a canoe, steered by a native in a rainforest. It is very exciting because I have never been down river before or in a canoe for that matter, and this native man is taking me to his headman, a sort of shaman who knows the cure for cancer.

Another page. This world feels familiar. I recall Ian McKellen in this world. I recall a sword and a name. The Flame of Anor burns bright and strikes down a Balrog. I am nine years old.

Another page. Where have the years gone? I was fat, I am losing weight. The Barasat Baruipur I am on is stuck at Patuli, while I am chuckling at a quote about how someone wants to tell a gold digger to go to the Devil but doesn't because he happens to be in love with her. I pull out my grayish black smartphone and type that into my WhatsApp status.

Another page, this time on a screen. A girl who reminds me of a dear friend drives downtown to a medicine man and asks a favor of him. There is a need to examine her cousin and some game is afoot in the house, but this is somewhere that Sherlock Holmes cannot interfere. 

Before turning the next page, I want to hear Isaac Slade and so I drop the volume of the laptop to 30% and turn on How to Save a Life. We are now in the present, with the future beckoning, tea gone cold, book looking at me askance and Slade singing stuff about praying to God.

Never in my life have I felt more alive than I feel right now, in this moment, with cold dregs of tea in a green cup on the floor, a book to finish, a faint glow outside my window, not yet dawn, and seeing as it's a day off tomorrow, a good breakfast of an omelette  made with Cheddar cheese to make for my father.

I realize that somewhere in these sentences is a story of a life that's entering it's 29th year, laid in front of your eyes. Among these lines is a world I have made and inhabit, sometimes only in my head and in that head of mine I am slow dancing with someone, as all around me buildings blow up. I look in my partner's eyes and whisper softly "You met me at a very strange time in my life".

You see, ever since I was a child, I always had one constant addiction. The written word. I loved writing letters. I loved stories. I loved to hear people sing. When my mother passed away, I cremated her with a copy of the book she held dear on her chest, so that when she reached her final resting place, she would carry what she held sacred with her there. After all, perhaps God would demand some form of tribute from her.

In short, I am a reader. What's your superpower? 

The Bilge Master

My Mother and To Kill a Mockingbird

 I remember my mother had a battered copy of To Kill a Mockingbird which was in three pieces due to it's age. I remember that she used to keep it in the almirah and not on a bookshelf, such was the protectiveness she had about the book. I also remember that she bought me a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and wrote in it thus, "Gutu, this is perhaps the best thing I am giving you". 

I remember the first quote that stuck in my mind when I read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time and it is a quote that a lot of us have quoted and tweeted and blogged about; "Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing". I was going through a massive O'Henry phase at the time so this tied in very neatly with some of O'Henry's axioms such as the line from The Pendulum where it is said of Katie that "She had become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the air he breathed- necessary but scarcely noticed". So it was for me and reading and I am one of those people who carries a book in their bag to read or if I am not carrying a bag, I have books on my phone (thank you Moon+ Reader!) for emergencies.

Now, my mother bought a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird for herself one day from Starmark and she wrote in it this dedication: " To Banu, for I tried to teach" just above the title of the book and she kept it with her, by her side. 

By this time, I 'm sure you've understood two things about me and my mother. One is that we are fanatical readers and the other is that To Kill a Mockingbird is a very special tome for us, just as Exupery's The Little Prince is the Bible for my father.

Unfortunately, the edition that my mother purchased got lost and so my mother got another copy of To Kill a Mockingbird for herself that she just kept on a bookshelf. I doubt she read the book even, it was just there. As Terry Pratchett said in Soul Music, "Sometimes all you can do for someone is be there". I believe firmly that more than people, my mother preferred books. This is a trait I have inherited. I too would love to read and read and cancel meetings with friends to read. I am one of those people, sue me.

So when I lost my mother in 2021, you can well imagine that the lost and grieving child in me turned to To Kill a Mockingbird for succor. I remember that somehow the entire meaning of the book had suddenly changed for me. Bereavement has a habit of doing that to you. 

What strikes me the most about To Kill a Mockingbird, (and this comes from multiple re reads of the book) is if you can manage to see the significance of Jean Louise (Scout) Finch from the perspective of Arthur (Boo) Radley. I think this is a really interesting way to present a character, where he is a here today, gone tomorrow type of character- more legend and less man in flesh and bone, and that it was the fact that the huge number of atrocities that his family were making him suffer through was why Scout became so important to him. Although a child, Scout did for Boo what no adult had ever done- she was there in his life. Boo took that immense strength from Scout and he survived the atrocities. 

And perhaps that right there is what my mother meant when she wrote that this book was the greatest thing she was giving me.

The new copy of To Kill a Mockingbird is now mine and in it I have written: "To Ashesh, for Lopa lives on in him". 

I just hope I can carry her name forward as I go on living this life of mine.

The Bilge Master

The Local Train and Gutu- A Google Maps Story

 I have loved travel and I am here with a travel story for you today. It just so happens that my job takes me to a lot of places, places I did not know existed. I find myself catching buses and wandering the corridors of an industrial park and I thank myself for having used the pandemic wisely and gotten myself a little fit. I find myself following a newly asphalt lain road somewhere on the shoulder of a highway heading for a train station. 

I find myself thinking as I walk, about how to get to the station- do I walk the six kilometers? Do I wait for a rickshaw that is going that way? I stop for a paper cup of cold tea and a locally manufactured biscuit while I sort out this issue. The tea is sickly sweet, the biscuit is crumbling. I finish it in three bites and the tea in four gulps. Now I can't procrastinate anymore. Have I not seen Peter Jackson's adaptation of Tolkien's books? Was it not a walk that the Fellowship undertook to get to Rivendell? 

So steeled, I set off, walking towards what Google Maps calls Belmuri railway station. I am confident about my walk. I make a brisk pace and it is only six kilometers. I can do this easily. The actual problem will be when I reach the station. Why? Good question. Let me swing the pendulum in reverse and talk about one of my fears.

I am terrified of local trains.

Feeling a tad like Frodo and Sam as they set off for Mordor to find Mount Doom, not to mention the bit where Frodo falls into the clutches of the orcs, I too find that as I walk, there is a nagging at the back of my mind. My mind whispers to me as Smeagol was whispered to by the voice of the Ring, "Do not get lost, Gutu". Sam enters Cirith Ungol. Belmuri station looms in front of me. Google Maps informs me that I have reached my destination. Little does Sundar Pichai know that his service has merely shown me the portal back to Kolkata proper. It is up to me to muster the courage necessary to get on the right train and to go back home.

However, I am nearly thirty. In the Middle Ages, I would have been expected to have taken a wife by now and sired an heir by her. Surely I can board a train? Surely I can make my way back from Howrah Station? As my mind is assaulted by these doubts, just as Sam picked up Sting and stabbed Sheoleb, I find Google Maps buzzing again to tell me that I have inevitably reached Belmuri. I see before me a large board and quickly snap a photo of it for the Instagram account.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Ashesh Mitra (@shoshamitra)

 

Then, throat dry and hands slightly shaking, I cut a ticket to Howrah. At this point, my mind is bargaining about how many human sacrifices I will make to the Old Gods and the New if I am able to not board the wrong train, with an attractive bonus of more sacrifices if they only deliver me to Howrah station in one piece. All of this, while trying to figure out which line the train is going to come on- Up or Down.

The train chugs into the station, a sixty ton angel of metal and electricity. Thankfully, a kind traveler tells me that this is indeed Howrah bound. On I get. It is now only a matter of time.

In my mind's eye, I have reached the Cracks of Doom. I recall vividly how Frodo and Gollum struggled on the precipice of Mount Doom. One final hurdle lay before Frodo, just as this hurdle lies before me. I find a seat on the train after a station whose name I hear incorrectly as Kamal Kumro (Amazing Pumpkin). Frodo loses a finger, I lose a one rupee coin. The train pulls into Howrah.

I catch an S7 from the bus stand outside the station. Frodo catches a ship to the Gray Havens. 

Suddenly, travelling by a local train doesn't seem impossible anymore. I unlock the door of my flat with my key and greet my father.

I am home. Belmuri, I owe thee for taking my fear away. Google Maps, I owe thee for making me find Belmuri. I guess you could say that the app can do more than just help you find a destination. In my case, Google Maps helped me overcome fear.

The Bilge Master

A Collection of Poems

 Hey guys! For a long time, I've been writing poems and keeping them on my phone. I thought of sharing a few today. They're a mixed bag- horror, love, unrequited love...it's all there. Here are five poems! 

The Bilge Master

The Things I Have Forgotten

When did I write this?

I see scratches on my arms 

And a sentence in my journal about bloody arms 

There are 27 new scars on my wrists 

How did they get there? 

Where is my mind? 

The last thing I remember is the smell of my morning cup of coffee

Which morning? Why? 

Isn't it Friday today? 

Which Friday? Friday the 13th of course!

No. It's Tuesday today

Oh God. It's Tuesday and I'm late for work

But why am I in scrubs? 

Who are you?

There's a glass in front of me 

I don't know who this man is 

Is that me?

And this liquid on my hands? It's too thick to be water

B...Blood?

Oh God, what have I done?

Where is my mind?

Heartbreaks Are Good

The thing you don't get about hearts is 

They're your body's music system

Literally turning your body into a boombox

So when they break, sometimes singing to them 

Is what makes them heal

Think about a line like the one 

Where someone asks for your heart

And tells you it's the most real thing about you

It hurts when that trust breaks 

When you can't hear the song for a while 

But, (and I speak from experience)

Your heart changed the day it broke 

The streets you called home changed 

Your world turned topsy turvy

And then the music came back

The heart wants what it wants 

Love 

From you

So listen to the beat of your heart

Listen to the music in your body

And dance to your own tune 

For there is nobody

Who cares for you like your heart does

Organisms

It's funny how before you

I was an organism 

You came crashing in 

On a sunny afternoon in June 

Walking like a one man army 

And showed me that

I could be more than an organism 

I could be me

Do I Want to Meet You Again?

It's been forever since we parted ways 

Mere children, sitting on a school bench 

While the maths teacher droned on 

We drew tattoo designs on the grid marked notebooks 

You wanted to be an artist 

I wanted to be a singer 

Entertaining the world with your art

Scribbled on the first page of a hymn book

We were just kids in love 

We never learnt from mistakes 

Just kept making them again and again

We didn't even know it was love 

To us it was just being there 

Then you went to a faraway city 

Which boasted a Sultanate 

And I stayed back in a city that had

Among other things 

A ruler called Siraj ud Daulah

Do I want to meet the adult you are now?

Do you want to meet the adult I've become?

With my potbelly, my crooked smile and awkward jokes?

Would you be willing to keep up with my fast paced Star Wars references

Even though you've not seen a single film yet?

Do I want to meet the adult you've become?

With your lipgloss smile

And your family's cheekbones? 

I wonder what we would talk about as we sip coffee?

Ex lovers? Present flames? 

Then, after the meeting

When my flight will be calling to board 

And you'll embrace me in the baggage claim

Will we remember the two kids 

Kids no more 

And smile

Because despite our fear of change 

Nothing between us feels different

We're still just two lost souls 

About whom Julia dreams each night

The Room Isn't Mine

Last night

I slept in my old room again

The curtains were closed 

The ghost in the tree outside

Was gone 

My room was hotter than I remembered it 

And the bookshelf at the foot of the bed had new and unfamiliar content 

And yet it was still my room

Does that make sense?

Is it me who changed 

The day I moved out of the room?

And although I came back and come back 

Every now and then

Has way led onto way?

I do not know 

The bed is still comfortable

The books are still there

But the room isn't mine anymore

I have trust issues 

The bedsheets don't smell like they used to

The pillow seems hard 

There's dust on the bookshelf

There lies here a broken heart 

I guess childhood's end has finally come 

And I don't need this room anymore 

Or is it that the room has grown up

And doesn't need me anymore?

My Family and Food

It has been a long time that I’ve felt in a space to write about my family with the kind of clarity that I used to have. It was a practice of mine to write about the idiosyncrasies of my family at least on the occasion of my parents’ anniversary. Unfortunately, owing to the passage of time, anniversaries have moved on to the next generation and the core group of children (my first cousins and I) are still single, and while I cannot speak for my sisters, I don’t really feel too much like mingling unless it is mixing a very old monk with a very young batch of coke.

 But today, it’s a morning too good to pass up the chance to speak a little bit about the family I have, and so while Gandalf reprimands Bilbo for being cheeky, I am putting my tongue in cheek and I will speak of cooking and my family’s approach to food.

 My grandmother was never satisfied with following the recipe. She felt cooking was an art form and certainly created many works of art in the ranna ghor such as incorporating soyabean into mutton chops and getting away with it. While Gordon Ramsay goes into cardiac arrest, I shall also call your attention to the fact that my grandfather’s recipe for chilli pork is one that was the stuff of legend at the table when we sat down to eat.

 And then of course that one occasion when my father went into “I must make fish without any ginger” mode and came up with an onion less and garlic/ginger less fish, and he succeeded in making it tasty as well and thus was born the bastard child of the kalia and the standard curry, which we call kharia. The recipe for this is a family secret meaning that my father has shamelessly and unapologetically forgotten how he made it.

 I spoke of the next generation did I not? Meet me. I’m the person who will infuse mutton with marmalade and decide it is too sweet and therefore assign it to the category of do not repeat, unless you want to psychologically torture your sworn enemies or wonder why Long Island Ice Tea has the words “ice tea” in it and then decide to pour white rum into a tumbler of black tea (also works with dark rum and coffee…add cream and whiskey instead and you shall have Irish coffee). I have also made chicken curry in which I have put whiskey while marinading and it has become my signature dish.

 And on this noble afternoon, I picked up a recipe book from Kashmir and decided to infuse the cooking method of one recipe with the ingredients of another just to see what happens. You may either think this is a bad idea, or you might just be surprised and ask for a second helping.

 Such is my relationship with my family and my food. The urge to experiment and to see what lies beyond the stress levels of the human stomach is something that is fascinating. I have no idea what I’m doing in the kitchen half the time, but I follow my instincts and my nose and very rarely has someone told me the food I fed them is bad. Obviously to bend the rules, you need to know them backwards and in this regard I’ve been fortunate to have the entire internet and the mothers (or fathers) or even the friends whose houses I go to, to swap recipes with.

 I do understand my grandmother’s sentiments when she said cooking is an art form. I merely try to emulate some of those principles today.

 Eliot asked in Prufrock if he should dare disturb the universe. I ask your stomachs the same question.

The Bilge Master