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