"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.

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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