Musings On What COULD Have Been...and What Has NOT Been

 I was reading Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba just now and remembered how special it was to me and how I read it in less than an hour and a half with my good friend Gayathri (admin and Sorceress Supreme of the Paperbacks and Backpacks book club) and suddenly my very organically random mind wanted to write so here I am at the keys again.

What teenager has not wanted to be a guitarist? I'm sure everyone has a story about how they got introduced to the sound of a six stringed instrument as was I. My story involves my friend Soumya Basu aka Choru Da who made me listen to Slash and Knopfler when I was in sixth grade and set me on a path that nearly made me a sound engineer, nearly made me a guitar player and gave me a place to hide when I was low. Choru Da, you will read this, I know and you will smile and text me from Down Under and say it means a lot to you. I think what you should know is that you mean a lot to me. Thank you for showing me the beauty of a part of the world that makes me want to seek beauty even in the darkest of times. 

But then again, my random mind, forever a slave to Brownian Motion now wants to talk about Robert Frost's poem The Road Not Taken, specifically the lines 

"Oh, I kept the first for another day

Yet knowing how way leads on to way

I doubted if I should ever come back"

What has this got to do with me not becoming a guitarist? Well, after pestering my parents for ages and ages, I did not get a guitar. Come on, this is me! If the story were to write itself the way all stories have so far then it would not be my blog would it? So yes there is a twist in this tale. I scored highly on the analysis question set for the poem The Road Not Taken and I've written about the significance of the poem when I wrote a farewell post for my seniors in college when I was in 3rd year. I felt the poem's message was most appropriate and I think I will have to link that post at the end  of this one so that you can revisit it!

Anyway, I did not become a guitarist. But I did become something else. I picked up a camera that my father got from his maiden trip to the USA back when Obama was the POTUS and I decided to go Dexter's Laboratory on it. What were the functions on the camera? What did the wheel do? Why these logos? I took that camera with me on walks and I clicked so many photos. I was enthralled. And then, I got a phone (a Sony Xperia E3, my second Android device) and that camera was stellar. I clicked away to glory. In between, I'd used a CyberShot DSCHX100V and the kind of creative and expressive power that camera gave me was out of this world. And so, a romance began. I became The Guy Who Has a Camera and my college batchmates used to ask me to photograph them and I learnt and learnt and learnt and expressed and expressed and expressed. 

I am still enthralled by the sound a guitar can make, I am still in awe of music and still use audio to unwind. But the road to being a guitarist is the road I did not take. I became a camera user. I will not say I am a photographer. That is a road I have not walked down yet. 

Ah, the point of this post? Nothing. Follow me on Instagram! (@shoshamitra)

The Bilge Master

Why I Read...

  “It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. . . . Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why."

~Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings 

Those of you who know me even slightly will know that I adore stories. I spend fifteen minutes or more on Instagram checking the stories and comics that the creators I follow have concocted up and most of my feed is filled with their talent. 

But the title of this is "Why I Read..." and to be honest I do not know the answer. I just know that if stories were to be taken away from me I would be devastated. Stories have gotten me through so much. I was five years old when my mother gave me a book to read and in the womb when my mother told me of the things we would do together. She taught me that the world is both beautiful and dark, and also that life is not about the Lamborghini in the drive way but the child begging for alms at a street corner, who hasn't eaten for a while and maybe a small packet of biscuits means more to him than any money his family will steal from him and use up in drinking themselves silly.

Stories are all around us. That's why I've been keeping a diary for a while now. From the moment you open your eyes, a story starts. How you spent your day is a story, the security guard in your complex whose WhatsApp you configured is a story. 

Grandparents told the best stories if you ask me. Their world was so different from ours. They didn't have access to books as freely as we did. They were a living, breathing treasure trove of experiences from the past; our first history teachers in a sense. I wonder why we are taught so sparingly about history. In reading William Dalrymple's City of Djinns I fell in love with Delhi all over again. My endeavour to learn Bengali is to read stories in my mother tongue, a practice I feel I should have started a long time ago.

Storytellers such as Neil Gaiman wax eloquent on the importance of libraries and the experience gathered from children's literature while storytellers like Charles Dickens (although in my opinion his characters are unrelatable) tell us long stories about good vs evil and how good prevails. John LeCarre will take us into the world of espionage. Alistair MacLean will enthrall us with thrillers. 

Edmond Dantes and his quest for revenge, Dustfinger and his desire to return home, Markus Zusak showing us a war torn landscape and Exupery telling us how important our child self is. All stories, all about the world we live in and all capable of teaching and giving us armor to use.

A story teaches you how to be good and also how to be evil. It gets under your skin (if you let it) and it shows you the world of words and their power from the perspective of someone else, someone who like me was perhaps born in the arms of imaginary friends.

I still cannot resist walking up to a person reading a book and asking, "Hey, what are you reading?"

Stories have been there for me longer than people have. My teachers told me I read to survive and my parents gave me the responsibility of taking care of our library. My friends say it is a bibliophile's paradise. I just think of it as a house full of stories.

And yet, some stories haunt me. Some stories break me and leave me a bleeding mess on the floor. Some stories give me the power to get out of a sticky situation.

I read because I do not know what or who I'd be if I did not.

The Bilge Master

So Long, Easy Rider

 He liked long drives a lot. Out on the road, with the top rolled back and cruise control keeping the car smooth. He was what Baez called Dylan in Diamonds and Rust- the original vagabond. Most at ease on highways- places he called home.

 But a few months back he had called a different place home. His home had a body, it had a voice He had wanted that home. Maybe it was the loneliness that made him seek out that home again and again. He felt like the un named boxer in Simon and Garfunkel’s song when he was at that home, lonesome and the New York city winters cutting into him, wishing he could go to the home of his youth. He had tried to find that home wherever he went and sometimes he succeeded. But it was always temporary and before long he was travelling on. I do not mean to imply that he did not have friends. He did and they cared for him. He felt at home with most of them, but the home he sought eluded him, always on his cusp and never his.

 He took to many hobbies- writing, reading like a man possessed, ordering and buying books like anything. His family thought he had a bad attitude so he kept away from them. However, his other family, the people he had met on his travels, they told him it was a pleasure being in his company and they introduced him to other people like himself.

 But still, home eluded him. Until he made his peace and realised that he liked being on his own. He liked the freedom of choosing his company, of having nobody tell him what to wear, what to eat and how to work out. And this was one freedom he hesitated to give up. Such freedom was magical and allowed him to sate his wanderlust. He started to look for photos and updated his camera with two new photos each day. He found a coven of readers and he chatted with them. He made friends who fuelled his creative side and gave him the courage to experiment and to express himself.

 And tonight, is like the other nights. He is on the highway, his favourite Uriah Heep song is playing and he’s on his way. He does not know where, but he’s on his way. I do not know if he will find home, but I do know he will not stop looking.

 “So long easy rider

I know I’ll miss you for a while

But sooner or later

I know that I’ll forget you”

The Bilge Master

 

The Roadmap to Bibliophilia

 Golpark has changed so much these days and yet you can find so many books there even now in the age of the Ebook and the piracy and the Kindle rising like a behemoth and everything going binary. In the future not so distant we will recall Orwell’s Big Brother and not Asimov’s R Daneel Olivaw.

 Since Samhain will shortly rise, I must bring to your attention these diaries about a library that has been built a long time ago and continues to evolve. This is a family story. It has suspense and ghosts in it or rather the dedications of those not with us, the post cards sent to a wife from another hamlet by her husband and the telegram a son got from his mother, away on holiday in Darjeeling. The hand written dedication in an Asterix comic which a grandmother scrawled before gifting the book to her grandson on his birthday.

 If you look at one of the three copies of To Kill a Mockingbird in this library, you will find one in which a mother now dead has remarked that the copy is for her, for “She tried to teach To Kill a Mockingbird. On his last birthday, the son of the house let his dear sister add a book to this library when he accepted the delivery of Tamas by Bhisham Saini.

 It is almost as if this library has a life of its own, a protector of its own and needs of its own. Every now and then, just as a woman craves attention and a man likes his smoke or his beer, the library likes it if someone stands in it and flits from shelf to shelf, picking out a book here, putting back a book there or jumping into the room and noticing that this shelf of books could do with some dusting.

 Where did it all start though, this haven of bibliophilia? I think it started sometime around the time a woman walked into a library and the librarian told her that her usual chair had been occupied by someone else. This disturbance in the Force must have led to a massive lightsaber duel, or did it? What if the woman was not inclined to violence and instead found that the man sitting in her usual chair was a PG Wodehouse buff and liked Bertie Wooster more than Lord Emsworth?

 Or could it have been the time that someone walking along College Street suddenly found a copy of Sons and Lovers going for about 6 paisa and grabbed it and ran home in the rain and put it up there with Emile Zola’s The Kill?

 Where is this library, you ask me? Why? Do you want to meet its custodian? Would you like to add something to it? Do you just need books like a sword needs a whetstone or are you just curious about which wand chose this wizard and if the wizard slew a Balrog or not? Or maybe the wizard in question is akin to Destiny of the Endless, always writing the Fates of Mankind in a book while his brother Dream gives William Shakespeare another idea to cure him of his block?

 You would be surprised to find both Gaiman and Shakespeare in this library, as well as Asimov, LeCarre, DH Lawrence, Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Jane Austen, Erica Jong, Irving Stone and Alistair MacLean.

 And so, one day I will take you there and you can meet the person who curates the library now, dusting it and arranging it and he will tell you more about the books his mother left behind, the books he got from Romania and the books he has had his eye on for some time now. What say you? Would you like some tea with this man?

 I warn you though, just as this library seems too good to be true and while I know it exists, there are a few things about the custodian you should know. He knows of witches who are adept at curses and hexes. He knows of a person, advanced in years who is not your average warlock and he himself keeps a record of the books in it on a certain device and makes sure those who borrow from him give back the books they’ve taken.

 A friend to those who want to read, this library’s stories have been handed around to a group of listeners and he always knows which story to tell. Just ask his friend AP, who had no idea of Gaiman before he narrated Sunbird or Jay who found a fellow Arthur C Clarke fan hiding in the ship of the Ramans.

 Yes, this man lives in the world of make believe more than the world of things to believe in but he finds a curious safety in the realms of the elves and the faeries, talking to ghosts about if they can eat food when they’re dead or trying to decipher his grandmother’s recipe for mutton.

 Come, let us go make our visit!

The Bilge Master

"Hello Lamp Post, What'cha Knowing?"

 I turned 28 two days ago and there's so many things that made my birthday special. The party, the wishes and the camaraderie. I still cannot spell that word, so thank you Dictionary feature on Google Chrome. 

It's been a strange life for me so far. I've loved. I've lost. I've become a rage filled monster and I've changed to become a mellow person but someone who has massive panic attacks sometimes and needs to do something with their hands to calm down. I've had a lot of struggles and I've been so messed up that I've not even acknowledged my achievements. 

Anger is all I've known for so long, so very long. And yet, here I sit, hands flying over a keyboard, phone humming as someone in London wishes me on Instagram, as an email arrives for me from Dubai, as the person whom my mother considered a friend drops her number in my WhatsApp and as my book club repeatedly, repeatedly laughs at me, with me, sings for me, dances for me and shows me, I don't need to be angry anymore.

It was my birthday two days ago. Two days have passed and yet people still wish me. They say they feel bad they couldn't on the day itself. Another message arrives from someone who is a first year sociology student and says he has ordered a book for me and wants to hand deliver it to me with a birthday message. I finally found the confidence to tell someone in my life that I value them as much as The Little Prince valued his rose. 

I do not know how it came to be that someone who saw only red and nothing but red, someone who was bullied in school because of his prowess in English and his skills, by those people who would just take advantage of him and blackmail him and take advantage of his loneliness to pass their exams...someone who lived his entire formative years in survival mode, is today sitting at this computer writing about how he turned 28, weaving a story about it in real time.

When I was about 20, I wrote a poem where I said that for a long time I've been staring into a face in a mirror and I do not recognize the face staring back. I repeated that experiment on my birthday, just before I walked into the kitchen and cooked a chicken dish. I came face to face with someone else. He was taller. He was fat, but he was not as fat as back then. He felt fitter and he felt he was breathing better. The child who stared at his 28 year old self could only wonder..."Is this who I've become?" 

What has this birthday taught me, you ask? I have learnt that I deserve love. I have learnt that I am good enough. It's easy to say haters gonna hate now. It's easy to say, I matter now. I may not matter to those related to me by blood, but I matter to someone in Romania. I may not matter to the racist Hindi teacher who made me fail ten times in Hindi and was instrumental in me feeling like shit throughout class nine and ten but I matter to the English teacher whom I've found again after more than 17 years, who called me twice on my birthday and who waits for my visits with a cup of coffee at the ready as I curse her laptop for making her life hard and ask it to grow up. I matter to the computer teacher I have not spoken to for over ten years, who I reconnected with and who remembers my birthday and wished me. I matter to the girl I met and who yelled at me on the phone because I had removed my birthday from Facebook and who couldn't wish me on the day.

I matter to the people who don't want me to look back anymore. I matter to the people I am going to grow old with, to the people who will share their milestones with me. I matter to the Instagram stories I'm gonna see, the ones from the accounts I follow, where there's a potpourri of artists and humans who make amazing content and need to be seen.

I matter to the Spotify playlist I'm making. I matter to the book I've finished writing that someone very close to me is editing now and that needs to see the light of day. I say I am not good enough and yet I am good enough to find three jobs in a pandemic situation and decide to leave two of them because I realised that they were not good for me, that they were affecting my mental health and not letting me be me.

How can I still be an angry person in survival mode anymore? It is time I realized that life is something to be loved and lived, to be spent with the people I've found along the way who love me and want me to live my life and share my life with them.

The friend who told me I gave him the confidence to write a blog of his own

The bookstore owner who calls me "babu" and has always told me I can come and have tea with him

The oldest friends in my life, friendships lasting 17 years now 

The stories I have to tell

The journeys I have to go on

The artist who sends me presents because I hugged him

The January baby who has her own scars and yet is always smiling, always growing, always full of ideas and always creating 

The bespectacled, long haired, little goofball, with the Honda limited at 140kmph who calls me a brother and says I'm an amazing DJ (and makes fantastic gin and tonics)

The two people in a far away land whose kids aren't here yet but who want me to be around when they come by and I can share books with them

The elder sister whose father has the same name as my father and therefore has opened her heart to me 

The younger sister just discovering Prufrock, with a rapier sense of humor who said I don't look as old as I am and nicknamed me

The person who helped me over one of the hardest losses in my life and set me back on my feet and wants to be at my wedding 

The doctor who fought by my side and brought me back my sanity

The other people, in the shadows, waltzing with me, smiling at me, blessing me, sharing my life with me

And lastly, the life I have not lived yet.

Time to live, time to love.

Hello! Let's live a little! 

Vamos!

The Bilge Master

An Apology

 For a moment my mind goes totally blank and then my hands find a few keys to strike. I strike them and suddenly this, whatever this is, starts to write itself.

I once had a nightmare when I was little. I feared I would be forgotten. I wanted to remain in the minds of some people. I wanted to not be forgotten. But then, I read The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and I realised that Joker was on point when he said that memory is treacherous. We remember a lot of things without wanting to and we forget a lot of things without meaning to. I wished for a powerful dagger like the one Prince Dastan had in Prince of Persia, but that would have been me giving vent to my hubris and even in Prince of Persia if you run out of sand for the dagger, you die. 

I grew older and people whose corporeal forms I had interacted with became ectoplasm in pockets of my mind and I stayed a dreamer. I dream of them and of their stories and I tell others of their stories. 

I am not a good writer, but if you take away stories from me, my mind will revolt and trash and struggle like a cornered animal, a deer that freezes in the headlights of a speeding car driven by a man who has had one too many beers and is driving home in the cold sleet of an oncoming European winter.

I think I've realised what this is. This is an apology to the nightmare I had when I was little. I think that somewhere is a house and in that house resides all the ideas that I have forgotten about. They are cripples. Some do not have legs or hands. Some do not know how to talk. Drunk on the ambrosia of creative adrenaline, I went too far with some of them, danced with only Diz and Dante and left Lucy somewhere in the sky without any diamonds. I think those ideas hate me. They feel they were not good enough for me. But then again, they forgave me and did not make me forget that I could learn to be a good writer. Those abandoned ideas sent more ideas to me and some of those ideas turned into non treacherous memories. 

More importantly, the graveyard where the ideas that didn't even see the part of the world I had created for them and died in birth lies to the north east of the house, in permanent repose. Those corpses haunt me in a different way. They make me run to books, and through books to stories. They fuel the ever consuming fire in me to make love to the written word, to disappear into a mythical world when the real one is too unkind. My love for stories lives on, as my attempt at winding up this apology slips away from me. My tired mind sips lukewarm tea and my phone reminds me that I need sleep. 

But I can't sleep. I have promises to keep.

I wonder if the ideas will accept this apology. 

The Bilge Master

Using Omegle to Build a Spotify Playlist

 Greetings, people of the page. 

We all know of the site Omegle, where mostly it's men trying to impress other men who are pretending to be women or bots going on about hookups. Woe betide if you're a girl on Omegle. There are so many very straight up horrible things you'll have to deal with, such as this one time I was chatting with someone and they had the audacity to ask for my sister's number.

However, I am now playing a little game on Omegle, where I log in, set my interest to "Music" and ask whoever connects with me to simply suggest  a song. 

Here are three examples of what happened the last time I did this (which was today)

So that. 

However, I did succeed to start building a playlist on Spotify which is liked below and will be updated now and then. Stay tuned! 

The Bilge Master