A House Full of Stories Ep. 24: The Kitemaker by Ruskin Bond

 Welcome everyone to another episode of A House Full of Stories. Today I've narrated The Kitemaker by Ruskin Bond. He is an acclaimed Indian writer whose ghost stories and other associated stories of the macabre are to kill for. I will be doing more tales by him soon! Till then, this is The Kitemaker.

The Bilge Master

A House Full of Stories Ep. 23: Shakespeare and Co's Chinese Dumplings by Jeanette Winterson

 Hey ho! I hope everyone is well and safe. Here is episode 23 of A House Full of Stories and it features Jeanette Winterson, a writer my dear friend Sreeja Mitra got me into! 

It feels great to be back and I trust we shall have some fun again! 

The Bilge Master

Kolkata As Seen Though the Lens of Someone Who Grew Up Here: A Guest Post by Anwesha Chowdhury

 Anwesha Chowdhury is a music teacher and musician whom I’ve known for about a year or so on Facebook. While the friendship has yet to cross over into the real world, she does have a good ear and is a very talented individual as I hope what you’re about to read below will prove. I saw this posted on her Facebook about an hour ago and it made me so emotional that I asked for permission to use it as a guest post for my blog. Anwesha agreed and so here it is!

 Thank you, Anwesha. This brought tears to my eyes and it is such a rare treat to meet someone who loves Kolkata with a passion that very few can express so well. I hope you live long and prosper and keep rocking!

 The Bilge Master

 Today while on my daily walk, I walked around 16 kms, around the lanes and by lanes of the city.

Since we all treat Facebook like a blog, I thought I'd pen down something I felt on my walk today.

Recently I've been seeing posts with "The only thing to do in Kolkata is leave", "Kolkata is a trash city", etc etc. At times I laugh at this, tell my friends -ei sohor tar are kichu hobe na,(This city is dead, there is nothing that will happen in this city) while I dream of building a future here myself.

I've had many, many people asking me why I want to stay here, gotten offers from around the country. My family is here, my sister shifted back here, my better half is here, all the kids I've gotten so attached to over the years, they are all here. All of this is a part of why I'm still here, but you know why else? This is where I first sat with a group of older dadas when I was in class 10 and they told me, “Kid you need to listen to Dream Theater". This is where I had my first heartbreak that made me want to express through music. This is where I cycled around the city with my friends, while my mom thought I'm roaming the streets of Jadavpur. This is where I met my first music teacher, who I still look up to today. This is where I had countless shopping dates with my sister, only to buy chips lol. This is where I acted like a clown in school trying to get people to laugh, and acted emo with others to get them to call me weird. This is where I walked through the streets of Gariahat looking at toys I really wanted, too scared to ask my mother for anything. This is where I walked into the metro station alone for the first time going to Dumdum to my boyfriend's house. This is where my sister threatened to tell my mother about some guy I liked as a kid, if I didn't buy her chocolates every day, and I obliged with my pocket money. This is where I got wet in the rain for 3 hours with the boy who's now my boyfriend, too scared to tell each other we liked the other.

This is the city I loved in, I fought in. The city that gave me friends, I never talk to (sorry about that). The enemies I made up with. Gave me the family I hate and I love. The boyfriend I despise most of the time but love more than I love anything. This is the city that let me become the person I am today. Yes, the city is horrible at times, but it is where I built my dreams. This is the city that built me. This is not just about Kolkata; this is about my hometown. I'm forever indebted to my hometown for making me the person I am. I think it applies to any of you and whichever city you are from as well.

And someday I hope I can become a person, in this old dingy city, happy with the little money I made knowing that I made a few children believe in their dreams and played a little part in building it.

 

Translations and NB:

1.     Dada- term of respect for someone older than you in the Bengali language, used to refer to a male. Didi is the female equivalent

2.     Jadavpur and Gariahat are areas in the city of Kolkata

 

A House Full of Stories Comeback Announcement

 It's been a rough couple of months but I did get to visit Blossoms in Bangalore and have since then picked up five new books, inclusive of the complete Saki (H.H Munro). I just wanted to let you guys know that as of next week, A House Full of Stories is making a comeback. Details in the video below! 

Let's gather around our campfires and let us begin the telling of tales again! 

The Bilge Master

Hangovers of the Bibliotherapic Kind

Authors can be the best and the worst. They can make you feel. Sometimes, you find a book that refuses to get out of your head and you know that your life has just changed and will never be the same ever again. I love and hate it when a book does that to me. I love the hangover that a brilliant book leaves in my mind and I hate the fact that I can never read the book for the first time ever again, that it will never surprise me at the end of paragraph 67, when the murder case is about to get really heated or the French chef whose cooking is paramount to the well being of your newspaper is about to give notice for the umpteenth time

But what about the books you come back to? The books whose spines are worn out and whose paperback jackets have been stained with fingerprints so many times that you can quite literally read them with your eyes closed? 

Picture a cafe in Paris. Hemingway sitting and drinking beer and writing a story that was until a moment ago writing itself and now is being written. Now think of that English paper you couldn't finish which asked you about Hemingway. Suddenly you are an undergraduate again and the working world is far away and you wish to fly into a book and get lost in it, while the outside world can go jump off a cliff for all you care

I have recently become a reader again and the part of my day that I look forward to the most is when I sit with a good book and read one chapter and then another and then another. The world (as stated above) jumps off a cliff and for those stolen moments I make memories or I read someone else's memories or walk around in someone else's imagination. A book is my portal into the mind of someone else. What will I find there? 

Will Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence teach me about genius? Will Isabelle Allende's My Invented Country show me a picture of Chile which will remind me how much I love Kolkata? Or will it fall to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast which will remind me that it's very important to visit Paris once before I die? 

I look back at all the times books have given me hangovers and taken me by the hand and transported me to cities and locations in time or kingdoms with dragons and knights in them and I shed tears of joy, and anger and frustration and melancholy. From a rickety bed in India, my imagination enters a cafe in Paris or a restaurant in London or a bar on the highway in America which smells of smoke and stale whiskey drunk straight from the bottle...and I'm safe again. No matter how my day has been, I have a book

That's a good thing to come home to. You see, in all my years on this Earth, books have been there by my side while humans have come and gone. I guess that's why a book is dear to me and most of my friends are fictional or in love with people who don't exist

So the next time the world gets too much for me, I'll pick up a book...and I'll lose myself

Again and again and again

The Bilge Master

My Journey to Completing My Middle Earth Collection

 

J.R.R. Tolkien came into my world on a windy February evening when my father walked into my room, freshly returned from a tour to Chandigarh trying to sell multicoolers. I had a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring in my library. 

As I dived in, having never heard of JRRT before, I loved the name Bilbo Baggins and I just could not stop reading. I read about Gandalf’s fireworks, about how the journey to Rivendell was thought of and executed and of course I marvelled at the burden Frodo was made to carry. I think it took me about a week to finish the book, because of schoolwork, but luckily, my parents always encouraged reading in me and let me stay up late finishing books. “Lights out!” was an exclamation I never heard.

A year later, for my tenth birthday, I got the complete one volume edition of The Lord of the Rings and I was off. My birthday was in October and I spent winter of that year lost in the realm of Middle-Earth. To this day, I get chills when I read of Gandalf’s encounter with the Balrog and how it allowed him to ascend to his true form, I want to be there when the Entmoot happens and I wish I could stop feeling scared when Aragorn (AKA Strider) walks the Paths of the Dead with Legolas and Gimli. Having secured the trilogy and devoured it more than seven times in the course of the next five years, I must now take you with me to a bookstore in Salt Lake where I found Unfinished Tales and The Silmarillion. It was Tolkien time again!

But here, my search hit an obstacle and many moons passed and while I watched all the movies when they came out, humming and hawing about if the Witch King of Angmar was scary enough or if Treebeard was endearing enough, my collection of JRRT’s works seemed to have hit a wall.

And then…my father went to America and came back with The Hobbit…and the fever hit me another time, for one does not simply read The Hobbit without once revisiting the trilogy does one?

However, my quest was not yet over because one book remained- The Children of Hurin.

For what seemed like an eternity, I searched for that book. I went to College Street- they said it was out of print. I had not discovered Bookline (a quaint bookstore in the myriad bylanes of Kolkata) back then, and I thought my collection would be doomed to remain incomplete.

So, imagine my joy when my father took me to Golpark to see someone last year and because I was bored, I wandered into a small footpath bookstore and there it was!

The Children of Hurin, second-hand, 155 rupees. Hardcover.

A journey that begun as a seed in the mind of a 9-year-old boy, saw its end almost sixteen years later. I now have all the books. Sometimes I look at them and I feel gratitude to them, because without JRRT, there would be no room in my brain for Christopher Paolini, Anne McCaffrey, Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett.

I feel like I myself have gone through the length and breadth of Middle-Earth to find them all, and in the darkness bind them.

 

The Bilge Master

Writing About Writing

 "When the lights go out, will you take me with you

And carry all this broken bone

Through six years down in crowded rooms

And highways I call home?

It's something I can't know 'til now
'Til you pick me off the ground
With a brick in hand, your lip-gloss smile
Your scraped-up knees, and

If you stay, I would even wait all night
Or until my heart explodes
How long until we find our way
In the dark and out of harm?
You can run away with me
Anytime you want"

~Summertime by My Chemical Romance

This post is an amalgamation of stuff I've been feeling about the way I've changed as a writer of small nothings over the years that I've been writing my blog. Before I go any further, I would like to add that a copy of this article will be put up on my Scrollstack so you can check me out on that platform as well.

I was a teenager who was dealing with raging hormones when I started this blog and I found a safe space in it and whatever came to mind got dropped here. I've spoken a lot about the hills and plateaus of my life through this medium and I've gotten a lot of support, not just from family, friends and acquaintances but also from people who are total strangers. Some posts worked and some did not and as I continue on this journey a lot of stuff will change. The brain of a 16 year old has now become the brain of a 26 year old after all.

I think the biggest challenge for me was swallowing my ego when people said something I wrote was good and telling them that I appreciated that they liked what I was writing but would they please tell me how I could get better? 

And then...I started reading Anna Karenina and my mind just went kaput. How could a human being come up with something so amazing? It was ethereal. I turned my attention to Bernard Shaw and Ernest Hemingway and suddenly I was afraid.

After seeing what these people had done with permutations and combinations of 26 letters I was terrified. A part of me felt and knew that I'd never be as good. I contemplated shutting the blog down and I went through a sort of ostrich with head in the sand business for a while.

Then, a dormant part of me suddenly awoke and said to me one day that I do not have to be as good as Hemingway or Shaw. I have to be as good as me and get better at being me. I recalled this scene from M*A*S*H, where Sherman Potter tells someone who is suicidal that the part of us that wants to hold on is stronger than the part of us that wants to let go.

What I'm getting at is this- there will always be a part of me that will try to discourage me or warn me that I might have bitten off more than I can chew, but there will be a part of me that will whisper or scream at me to just shut up and try.

And I will try. That is all.

The Bilge Master