"Oh, patron saint of lonely souls, tell this boy which way to go"

 Its happening again, like it always does. My writing process is being a thorn in my side. I know I want to write about highways and cars and Bon Jovi's Lost Highway, but for the life of me I cannot put two and two together and I'm frowning at the screen, sipping some tea and hoping for the powers that be to guide me. 

I always liked the lyric "Oh Patron Saint of lonely souls, tell this boy which way to go" though. It reminded me of the saying, "Red sky at morning, sailor's warning" or maybe I've been reading too much Moby Dick. That novel grows on you, let me tell you. Ishmael is initially hard to crack but after a few chapters, his story becomes compelling. I wonder how much a pirate or a buccaneer prayed honestly. Well, maybe I'll be cancelled for calling someone a pirate in this day and age but the other option would be privateer isn't it? 

But yes, the idea of asking a Patron Saint, that too of lonely souls was something that struck me back when I heard this song for the first time. As it is, a Bon Jovi song never fails to get me excited, (have you heard Always?) and this was no exception. The video was also a charming one to be honest, (linked below). But now that I've spent some time rambling like Radagast the Brown, amidst the brambles and thickets of the woods, I find that I still don't know what I want to say. Is the song a prayer, an acknowledgement of the powers that be, or something about moving on, 'coz like it or not, roads do go on and on; and "Man may come and man may go, but I go on forever". 

So much imagery in this, isn't it? I like situations like this where I go on and on talking with the person reading this and it seems to me like somewhere, something clicks in them. Now I am aware that sometimes I am an editor's nightmare and that essentially most of this, if put into a book would first be deleted or furiously scratched out with a red pencil, wielded with the sorrow of ages, but yeah, thankfully this is not a book. 

The concept of a lost highway though. Is it an acknowledgement of trying to chart a course back? Is it a plea to get away from something or somewhere? Is it an embrace of loneliness or is it just the "I cannot take this anymore, I need to drive" that happens to us from time to time? Or is it pointing out the necessity of being lost, of the two roads that diverge in a yellow wood and since you cannot be one traveler...

I never thought about Bon Jovi's Lost Highway this way, not once. Yet, after putting the song as my ringtone, some of the strains have started to come and hit me and it's prompted this piece from me on a Thursday morning and my initial intention was to just have this be a small read that you could finish on the way to work or over that first coffee but well, we're beyond that now. I will however talk about the instruments in this. There's quite a solid guitar base here, but the sound is different from the usual hard hitting that Bon Jovi does. I've found it to be a case of a more subtle way of giving hope as opposed to earlier works like Keep the Faith where he was earnestly telling the listener that it gets better and that living is possible. 

My father used to say that a car is a means of getting to point B from Point A. Over the course of time, I learnt to imbibe that philosophy for the brief time that I drove a car, but then I realised it was more about being in the passenger seat as a navigator and going along for a ride.

And, sometimes...just sometimes, you need a car to get away to point B from point A and I think that Bon Jovi is actually saying that in this song. It's a hopeful song which asks you to move ahead, stay strong and trust in the powers that be in a very interesting way.

"Hey hey! I finally found my way,

Say goodbye to yesterday

Hit the gas, there ain't no brakes on this lost highway"

And the rest...is silence 

The Bilge Master

Debts

 A few years back, I reconnected with my English teacher from sixth grade and we’ve been getting along like a house on fire since then. If you haven’t been reading enough of the tripe I put out there and am tyrannical enough to call writing then you won’t know the fact that my brain immediately wanted to make an F451 reference after the first sentence, because I deeply admire Mr. Ray Bradbury and feel that his book Something Wicked This Way Comes opened my eyes to a better understanding of Shakespeare or (as I like to call him, Shakey Baby). I’m not trying to say that you should call him that, most certainly not, but calling a writer something ridiculous oftentimes makes studying that bugger’s work a little easier on the eyes and mind. But, I digress. One of the things my teacher chastised me for as a child in sixth grade was my compulsion to bite my nails and some 25 years after the fact, she chastises me for giving up on what she feels are excellent ideas for articles and stories. Well, in the light of the fact that my father passed away recently, I find that one of the story ideas I had pitched to my teacher will now (possibly, and in a way that justifies the signature at the end of this post; that alter ego of mine from 2010 looking on with bated breath as I drum a note on the Backspace key) come to see the light of day.

I want to talk about libraries and librarians today. I want to talk about books and stories and safety and how that safety is taken away by someone who had the gall to tell us books were safer than people and lived up to that quote effortlessly. Yes, Neil I am looking at you with bitterness and disgust right now as I take all the books I had of you and consign them to new homes, while my heart breaks for Sir Terry whose amazing essay about you in A Slip of the Keyboard I read this afternoon. Oh, Neil you poor excuse of a man and poster boy for the neighbourhood compost heap. But yes, moving on from that digression, the importance of libraries and books in my life is what I want to write about today and I want to talk about my family too, with or without the other animals we’ve adopted and we’ve cared for and had care for us.

The fact of my privilege is that I happen to be born in a family of bookworms and you cannot chuck a slipper in my house without hitting a book or a bookshelf or a bookmark. My flat is basically two bedrooms, with books on the beds ,three chairs, a quilt that my mother used as her personal arson practice area, (by this I mean that she would inevitably drop lit cigarettes on the poor thing), repurposed to make a small sitting room and a rocking chair and armchair belonging to my great grandfather. The rest of my flat is books and aside from the books telling their own stories, these books end up telling a second and sometimes even a third or a fourth story. There’s the book my father bought from Golpark and read in two nights before a date with my mother when they were courting, there’s the book I salvaged from the books I gave my grandmother, which has her name written on it in my handwriting, there’s a book belonging to the grandfather I never knew, which I discovered was being held together by electrical tape and I read from cover to cover, getting chills when a certain man in it asks his brother in law to “answer for Santino”. And of course, (because life isn’t all smiles and sunshine), there are the books that languish in the house,  which I do not have the heart to discard and yet know that I will never read again, unless my mental health improves a little more and it doesn’t hurt to think of the woman who they belonged to.

In the bookcases littering libraries galore, I found a different world to the one in my house. I found a world of faeries and goblins and assassins and teenagers who didn’t do maths homework but found ways to catch a murderer. I suppose my love for the whodunit stems from the discovery of the short story collections edited by Alfred Hitchcock where I was shown a whole new world of mystery and fear or the ones written by Franklin W Dixon, the quintessential Frank and Joe Hardy who were cool enough to know how to utilize karate chops while I had trouble eating with chopsticks. The happiest hours of my schooldays were the ones spent in the library in the arms of Orpheus and Eurydice and Alexander Dumas and the rebel Mowgli. I learnt that animals have voices, I heard the clarion call of gods and had a crisis of faith when I realized Batman is a psychopath. I found hope in Frodo’s loyal Sam, wishing to roam the lands of Middle Earth forever, Balrog forsooth!

Then there was the library mouse that showed up one day out of the blue and we talked for six years, daily. We shared so much of our lives and libraries with each other. We cried at the same bits in books we had discovered- me in garage sales or secondhand bookshops here and there and my friend in multiple bookstores across the sea. I suppose I owe so much to people who don’t even exist (and to those that do), for it was in books that I found a way to talk to girls at parties and became confident about language and unapologetically shout from the rooftops that I am a weird guy who reads a lot.

My debt to English teachers who saw this need in me, principals who helped me build it into a way of life and friends who came into my life because I read books knows no bounds. If you are what you eat, it follows that your mind is what you read.

And one day, fed up of being told that I would not amount to much as a writer, I found the cojones to found this blog. I should say the blog found me, not too early, not too late, but precisely when I meant it to find me. Like Prince Dastan from Prince of Persia, I found that no matter what I do, I cannot change my fate. I like to comfort myself on the long and lonely nights by reminding myself of the words I am surrounded by, the words that voices sing to me from my speakers, the words I have read and forgotten about and the words I am yet to discover and imbibe.

And when I look up at the sky at night, I see a million different stars and I see a billion things I can write about those millions.

This is a declaration of dedication. I solemnly swear fealty to words, and allow them to morph me and transport me to other realms and minds. I know that when I miss my parents a little too much, I can turn to the words they left behind for me, and I won’t be so sad.

To close, I am reminded of my uncle who owns a bookstore and has only this to say:

“I wish I had more time to read them all, more space to keep them all and more money to buy them all”

The Bilge Master

Session Attended On "Curses and Boons" Hosted by The School of You & My Impressions

 I have just been a part of The School of You’s session on Curses and Boons, which was a freewheeling discussion about mythology and how many figures in mythology came up with a curse on some people, such as the story of Cassandra and Apollo in the Greek myths or closer to home, the story of Karna in the Mahabharata.

We went on to explore the nuances of injunctions such as “don’t exist”, “don’t be you”, “don’t belong” and how these affect our day to day activities and put unwarranted pressure on us to be something we are not, (or never wanted to be). As a further means to illustrate this, I spoke up and said that my mother would force feed me books by people like Thomas Hardy or Fyodor Dostoevsky and while I accept that some of these books are among the greatest written in the history of mankind, (which immediately set off a train of thought in me about how great that history is anyway, when you consider the Crusades, the actions of the Knights Templar, Charlemagne or closer to home the riots and the Indian freedom struggle from the oppression of the British), I found another world in the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and in the films of Guillermo Del Toro than in those books and I think the fact that I could not bring my mother into those worlds, that she expected me to inhabit her worlds without question and yet would never bother with my worlds; well it was that which led me to grow apart from her.

It is funny how the session had more to offer though than what was for me such an immense personal introspection, because we were split into groups and told to re write the story of Karna from the Mahabharata and this was by far one of the best activities I’ve ever done. Our group dived into it, with the clock ticking and eight minutes speeding by and we discussed how, if Karna, who was given a raw deal from the very beginning with his mother Kunti rejecting him (being of course a textbook example of how “don’t exist” is an injunction) instead hadn’t or how his lie to his teacher wouldn’t have been necessary and if Dronacharya had been his guru. We concluded that had this been the case, perhaps (with 25 seconds on the clock) there would have been no Kurukshetra and even no Bhagavad Gita. I must say this story makes a bit more sense than seeing Karna suffer such injustice. I feel, (like others felt in the session too) that his choice to not play the victim card and to be generous and selfless makes Karna a more rounded character ,and a more believable one than Arjuna.

At this point, there was a discussion on how Hindu mythos as a whole is very  unforgiving of mistakes and sends the message that mistakes are what bring about huge penalties and therefore should never be made and some of the mothers in the session went on to say that they don’t read or discuss the Hindu mythological canon with their children.

This reminded me of every single teacher I’ve had who has taught me anything and how they would always encourage me to make mistakes and how they would guide me so that I wouldn’t be making that mistake so effortlessly in the future. Being a freelance teacher myself, I was reminded of a student of mine who was never motivated and all I told him was to just go and give his exam and not worry about any consequences. He thrived and he said to me at our final class that I was the only teacher he had had who had believed in him and not written him off as a lost cause.

I digress, but this got me around to thinking that even a boon is not without its conditions. Stand on one foot for a ridiculous amount of time and you will be granted this boon. Lord Shiva and Ravana, Ravana wanting some recognition of his faith and instead being humiliated because he went too far in lifting the Kailash parvat; or the Prince Dastan from the Prince of Persia video game series who is given power over time itself and is motivated to protect his home of Babylon and yet the underlying theme of “You cannot change your fate”, which we are made to see as he loses Kaileena, the true love of his life and returns home from his battle with the Dahaka to find that indeed, Babylon does lie in flames before him.

Someone had written in the chat of the meeting something along the lines of “When the student is ready, the teacher appears. However, when the student is really ready then the teacher disappears.” A jest indeed, but is it/was it?

Is there truly something that is unconditional in this world and is there truly a need to be perfect? I think what this session reinforced in me are the following points:

One- it is okay to not be okay

Two- perfectionism is a sure fire way to total disaster

Three- celebrate and rejoice the fact that you are flawed. Even God made a mistake in creating humans (since Biblically speaking, humans are flawed creatures) and ignoring Lucifer’s warning that we as a species are flawed

Four- embrace every mistake you make as with each mistake you grow a little

Five- forgive. Forgive those that hurt you, forgive those who make mistakes, and of course forgive and be  kind to your own self.

 

I thank the School of You from the bottom of my heart for this session which has given me so much food for thought and happiness and would love to attend more such sessions as and when I can.

Ashesh Mitra

For more information about The School of You and what it is they do, follow the link below

The School of You 

Goodbyes

 “Bury all your secrets in my skin

Come away with innocence

And leave me with my sins

The air around me still feels like a cage

Love is just a camoflague

For what resembles rage, again…”

~Snuff by Slipknot

 Sometimes you don’t get to say goodbye. Sometimes, she’s just gone and you’re suddenly at the cremation. The relatives come over, the ever oversmart friends say they’re sorry, as if an apology will bring her back. You try to cry, but nothing comes. Are you even human anymore, you ask yourself as you pull on that shirt and spray on the cologne for the Zoom call interview.

Your not so oversmart friends come over. Some of them hold you and watch as you tremble with the heaviness of the hammer blow that’s shattered you. You childhood memories with her play a dance of death in your dreams. What is a dream? Is it supposed to make you happy, or sad, or just fuck you up?

You feel yourself reaching for another bottle while you see your surviving parent cry. So, you put aside your pain, like you always have. After all, you’re the child who grew up too fast, ate too much and was an academic disgrace.

Yet somehow, somewhere in the cosmos, you realize that there are still bits of her in you. The heaviness settles in your heart again as you pack a duffel bag full of books to sell. Her books. You seek solace from the knowledge that you never made her proud of you. You seek to run away from the memories of her beatings and how fast your heart used to beat when you thought that maybe, just maybe 73 in English would be the currency that saved you from a thrashing (It did not).

This is an oft repeated story.

But yesterday, something changed. After 8 years, you sat down to watch cricket. You commented in your WhatsApp group that since the pitch was favoring spin, it would be an even match. You shouted when Rohit Sharma hit a four and a 20m, 96m in the crowd six. You felt your heart break when Kohli left for a duck owing to one of the most amazing leg before wicket decisions.

And India won.

India won. Out of nowhere, a memory started to play in your head. It was the summer hols of 2003. You had woken up and the telly was on. She was standing ramrod straight as a flurry of unknown faces flashed on screen to the accompaniment of the national anthem.

India vs Pakistan. The Master Blaster vs The Rawalpindi Express. It was a strange kind of feeling, as you sat next to her and you experienced something new.

It was the summer of 2025 and you were on holiday for your health.

Rohit Sharma vs Rachin Ravindra. That same strange feeling.

India won.

But that was not all. After such a long time, you remembered something about her that did not make you sad, or angry, or upset, or send you reaching for pills.

Sometimes you don’t get to say goodbye, because the person never leaves.

 
The Bilge Master

Real or Fictional (Part Three)

This is a series I've started called Real or Fictional. Your task is to conclude at the end of reading this short excerpt about a person if that person is real or fictional. 

Abusive language is something that's bad for health if you don't know what it means. However for Sheikh Arjulam Chisti, abusive language was a mantra. Rather than busy himself with the teachings of his gurus, he would find himself inventing a (others called it stunted) vocabulary of abusive words. 

The usual suspects were there of course. The F word, the N word and so on. But there was also a regional one from Bengali which had been modified to include a banyan tree in its linguistics. 

The Rani Saiba shuddered at Sheikh Arjulam Chisti's brazen use of his custom dictionary but she could do nothing much. If she denied him the royal bed, he would go to the (bountifully stocked) harem would he not? Once there he would improve further upon his dictionary. It was a typical case of dammed either way, for Arjulam Chisti wasn't pious in the least.

Then one day, the Sheikh got word that potentially hostile Bengal rulers were at his borders. I must mention that the Sheikh despised warfare and so he chanced upon a way to end the fighting before it began.

When the envoy of the Bengalis arrived, Sheikh Arjulam Chisti invited them into the court and fed them succulent legs of mutton. He presented the envoy and his retinue with copies of a volume he called "Sheikh Arjulam Chisti Ki First Class Khisti". It contained the most creative of abusive languages based on Bengali abuse.

The envoys could not believe their eyes for here was a way to write in code and outfox other enemies. I am told an alliance has been struck up with the Sheikh and frequent coded letters using the guidebook "Sheikh Arjulam Chisti Ki First Class Khisti" is used even today!

What's that? An example you say? Well, I'll give you the principle.

Just attached "ch***a" to any word in Bengali!

Is the Sheikh Arjulam Chisti real or fictional?

The Bilge Master 

Real or Fictional (Part Two)

This is a new series I've started called Real or Fictional. At the end of this post about a person, you get to decide if the person is real or fictional!

Book clubs are a fun place to be, but they can be toxic as well. I was a little apprehensive about joining some clubs but then I suppose I was young, or simply stupid to think that some people were in book clubs for the books and not the ego masturbation!

But then came two clubs and the people who ran them. From one admin, I learnt how to run a club. I learnt not to give up and I found friends. The girl who ran this club is a dear friend, with a talent for teaching and writing.

The other club is running well and the admin asked me to help him. Even if I'm not active, I go there sometimes and discuss whatever is being discussed, thereby learning to think on my feet. 

But this guy just appeared in my life one day. He happened to have a blog and a mutual friend built a bridge for us. The friend has since then fucked off, but the two of us have a club! Yet again, something that seemed unpleasant led to something different and rewarding.

I suppose some clubs are not for me, and some clubs are where I'm born to be. 

Are these admins Real or Fictional? You decide!

The Bilge Master 

Real or Fictional: A Series (Part One)

I play a game when I'm on public transport or just waiting for someone to turn up where I look at a person next to me or in my field of vision and I try to give them a backstory. This series is going to take that spirit of creativity but the challenge is to figure out if the person exists in the real world or in the fictional world of my head! 

Here we go, then!

An old woman who lives next door. She has two children, both married and her son is in the USA. She likes to read Bengali books and the newspaper. She makes it a point to organise a Saraswati Puja in the house and chants the mantra herself. 

She's also a good cook and must have been formidable in her younger days. Since her daughter is married, I know her son in law as well as their dog, an adorable golden retriever. But I'll write about them some other time. I am usually the one she calls upon if she needs to send an image on WhatsApp or if she wants to treat me to something she just made.

She also gifts me a kurta or t shirt during the Pujas and invites me to lunch on my birthday and inevitably there's a book waiting for me when I show up!

I was fortunate to know her husband as well, he was a man of few words but he was always someone who was kind to me. 

It's very rare finding a neighbour like this in today's day and age and I hope I learn a few more things from her as we move forward.

Real? Fictional? You decide! 

The Bilge Master 

Rambling On About One Piece

I seem to be sharing some morbid posts now and then so this time I'm just gonna talk about this sudden encounter with a fictional character and how much he speaks to me on multiple levels. 

I'm sure many of you know the name Oda (Oda Sensei to some) and his ongoing work, "One Piece". It's the story of Monkey D Luffy, the man who ate the Gum-Gum Devil Fruit and now is elastic. He dreams of being the King of Pirates and on his journey he's got some really interesting characters tagging along. 

The character that has struck me hardest is Roronara Zoro, a bounty hunter skilled in the Three Sword Style of fighting. He's a tough cookie but one of the most outstanding characters put to paper (and in this case image). 

Since he made Luffy his captain, his honor is bound to Luffy and even though Luffy gets in strange situations, there is a certain trust Zoro has in him. He's the one person who always sees the good Luffy tries to do in the world and thus he is always with Luffy. 

I have of course just started my journey and have 1000 episodes left but the prospect of spending 1000 episodes with Roronara Zoro and the other straw hats is something I'm looking forward to.

Which character in One Piece speaks to you? Let me know!

The Bilge Master 

The Act of Letting Go

"You only miss the sun when it starts to snow 

Only know you love her when you let her go" 

~Passenger 

If you'd told me a few years back that I would be writing this article, I'd have slapped you across the face and told you to fuck off. I guess when I look back at that rage filled man, I want to give him a hug and just tell him that I'm him too, I'm him and I'm going to be okay. 

The thing is, I've never known peace you see. It was either my mother or my father or a family member or a teacher or a mentor or a "well wisher" messing with my peace. This lack of peace continued until I got out of college, even after my mother died and well into the tail end of my 20s, with many people registering shock that instead of mourning my mother I was writing bad things about her and not forgiving her. Nobody understood the pain I was in, the pain she had caused me and the love she had rejected. Well, maybe Phoebe Waller Bridge did when she wrote 

"I don't know where to put it. All the love I have for her". 

But I forgot about all the people who love me, and always will. Even when I was gaslighting myself into thinking that I don't deserve love, I found them right there, guiding me back to them. They told me they needed me. They told me they wouldn't be able to deal with my absence if I died. 

That's the thing isn't it? You don't want to die coz there's 1000 episodes of One Piece to watch. You don't want to die coz Brandon Sanderson is still writing The Stormlight Archives. You don't want to die because you haven't finished Red Dead Redemption 2.

You don't want to die.

Neither do I. 

And just because I won't forgive her, doesn't mean I didn't love my mother. Maybe it's because I loved my mother that I won't forgive her. 

The Bilge Master 

The Ones You Want to Dance With Aren't Here Yet

 The things that you leave behind don't always hurt you. Sometimes, what you leave behind heals you and allows you a different perspective to things. Sometimes, it's a veg momo that changes things, it's seeing someone in a new avatar and knowing that some things don't change and that even when young you were right about someone. 

And then as you grow old and Bruce Springsteen sings "Dancing in the Dark", you realise that perhaps the ones who you want to dance with aren't here yet, so yes, take a look in that mirror and keep your shoes ready. 

If no one takes your hand, well then at least someone remembers that you made them try veg momo. 

It is strange how terms like "bigger picture" start to fade away in such moments

The Bilge Master