On matrimony - mine (or ours)

I guess I could begin this blog by quoting Anthony Burgess' first line in his Earthly Powers: "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me." But there would be problems: First, the line would fit not I but, say, the venerable Arthur C Clarke; I have no ganymede since I am, unlike Burgess' Toomey, unrepentantly heterosexual. Second, I am a bit more than half of Toomey's age. Third, the archbishop isn't going to come bustling to see me - I'm going to go meet a purohit, a priest.

That's what one does when one's getting married. And I am, later today.

But Toomey's apprehension and anticipation and petulance at having had his accustomed life disturbed are no less mine. All of it comes from about two decades of being (repentantly) single and a certain insensate, intangible and often exclusionary of people lebensraum that is the lot of men who thought (and think) that they aren't good enough for permanent partnerships and, so, keep expanding their "space" - and then when all hope of populating that space is nearly, but not entirely, lost, embark on a dreamboat. (Is that word "dreamboat" used for women alone? If it is, I wonder why. Would someone kindly provide me the etymology?)

Ah, crud, I've digressed again. In point of fact, the woman I am to marry has been my dearest friend for five long years, and I hers, and it is only three months ago that we discovered that what we felt for each other was more than a sharing of daily personal chronicles of office political Olympiads and books - hers on sociology and fantasy fiction, mine on everything and thus, consequently, nothing - and films and gender issues. Impecunious as I am, I have never had a more resurrective benediction in my life: her beauty - and she is sublime - is held together, as if by a centripetal force, by her mind. She is physically younger by a generation than I am, but emotionally and intellectually older by a generation than hers, and so we are united by an attraction in which chronospatiality can go roll a hoop. (Just goes to show that one of Einstein's many brains was working like clockwork - even before the goo was bunged into a jar of formalin.)

As the days to the halcyon D-Day - if there be such a thing - rolled closer, both of us understood, for the first time, the absolute juggernaut implacability of that anachronism called Hindu tradition. We're both atheists (although I sometimes catch glimpses of that absoluteness being deflated in her by insidious intervention), but the Indian registered marriage system is fossilised enough to be palaeontological and wouldn't accept the latest government-issued identification papers as proof of anything at all. So, in came the Arya Samaj, which is a lot more liberal and trusting - and the purohit seems to be more amenable to skipping a heartbeat or two when I intend to threaten him with kneecapping if he doesn't keep the interminable Hindu Vedic rituals - fire, ghee, scads of smoke and all - down to a half hour or so. There's ethical hypocrisy lurking around in the shadows like one of Lucifer's minions here, of course: What are two atheists doing having a Hindu wedding? But, I tell thee all, use the system to crumble its crenellations.

Doesn't wash, does it? Hell. But I'll rationalyse all that when my beloved's hand upon my fevered brow leads me to think that I inhabit an arbor of sweetness and gentle green instead of a bedroom toppling over with thousands of books whose solemn, inexorable lines brought me to this psychotic pass, in the first place.

More on the wedding - it's been hijacked: by relatives, relatives of relatives, relatives of relatives of...Augh!...each with some kind of affiliation to one or more, or many, many more, of India's 300 million gods and goddesses (pardon the political incorrectness, but millions of years of Hindu tradition, when the first modern human walked Earth just 100,000 years ago, is nothing to sniff about). And each with a brand new, possibly neologistic, idea of how many rituals to include in order to keep the newlyweds as far apart as possible for as long as possible. Some of the rituals are so abasing that we've decided to excise them from the "thy wedded bliss" rant altogether (which is where the unimpairment, or otherwise, of the purohit's elbows now comes into the picture), and some are chants guaranteed to induce nuptial narcolepsy and are more or less incomprehensible to the priest himself. Millions of years of tautology, etc. Rote. Mug.

Mugs, both of us. And all we wanted was a quiet, whispery affair - well no, not exactly: but an ambient veena, a mild woodwind section, clones of Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa doing a mad drummers' jugalbandi (Providence alone knows how they'd weave it all together, but if the fusion group Shakti could do it, so could they) and Janis Joplin, yep, definitely Janis Joplin.

But, heavens, it's our families getting married to each other! We're just the bonfire around which they're doing their triumphal wardance.

Bumbling bibliophile in College Street in Calcutta

The mosquitoes had stopped divebombing and the frogs had stopped doing their prince act, so there were, obviously, clear portents of rain. My in-laws-to-be asked me to take along an umbrella, but since a Bengali domiciled in Delhi for more that three decades knows more about Calcutta than Calcuttans do, I, obviously, smartly didn't.

The cab drive to College Street was nighmarish - or daymarish, what you will - Baja-style roads packed with buses well past their retirement and running, inch by bloody inch, on diesel engines spiked with kerosene, the only Ambassador taxis in the country (since only those iron Vauxhall ripoffs can survive Calcutta traffic), a few foolhardy motorbikes - and, oh yes, people, so many people that one tends to forget they're there at all.

College Street is no different a proposition, except that it is home to some of the most illustrious colleges in the country. (I, as a Delhi Stephanian, have a dispute with that, but more of that in a later blog.) College Street is a f***ing hellhole, with one of the only surviving tramlines rolling in the city on girders so old that they've eaten a pit down the middle of the asphalt, like an ancient river doing its eternal erosion thing. Both sides of the road are lined with tiny shops - lean-tos, with asbestos and tarp roofs that I found, to my consternation when the rains came punching down, surprisingly waterproof.

The street, Calcutta's pride, which three decades of doctrinaire communism has deprived most of the city's Bengalis of, houses many of the city's colleges. The University of Calcutta, India's second oldest modern university, was established in 1857. On one side of CU (as it chooses to be called) is Presidency College, irrefutably one of India's best, founded in 1874. On the other is Asia's oldest medical school - the Calcutta Medical College - founded in 1835. Facing Presidency College is the famous - or infamous, depending on how you look at history - Coffee House, where God created the universe and left it to the Coffee House's insolvent intellectuals to discover the beauty of it.

But, the shops being waterproofed didn't help - I got soaked anyway. The tarp is there to protect not the pedestrians, it's there to protect the books.

And, ah, the books! Even though most of the shops have converted currency to IIT kunjis and CAT simplifiers and suchlike, if you stick your nose in deep enough, you'll smell the dust of old vellum, sometimes hear the distressing crackle of yellowed 100 gsm matt paper irredeemably cracking when the piles shift because of the temblor of the trams clanging by.

Even with my butt soaked and my head dry - creating a thermostatic difference that would have lit up the whole street - I found what I wasn't looking for but then discovered that I had been, all my life. Auslander that I was, I spent an hour at the first three shops that had various ripoffs of the Da Vinci Code and a single book on Verrier Elvin. After better sense overcame the balking and embarrassment of having to shame these shysters by not paying out a paisa, three shops down the line - of about 200 shops on either side of the road - I found a whole pile of pre-Independence published, 6" X 3", leatherbound volumes of classics that some impecunious Bengali had sold, in undoubted grief, to this particular barker. He asked Rs 60 for each, I haggled desultorily and brought him down to Rs 32 each. I'm now the proud possessor of 12 volumes - if their diminutive size will permit them that noun - from The British India Publishing Company, Calcutta, printed in Great Britain, of Lorna Doone, Adam Bede, The Innocents Abroad, The Scarlet Letter, Wuthering Heights, Ben Hur, Silas Marner, G K Chesterton-Selected Essays , Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,The Hunchback of Notredame, Edgar Allan Poe's Tales Grotesque, and Mill on the Floss. Beat that. Money's not the point here, but if it were, they'd fetch me a fortune on E-Bay.

But I was also snuffling around for other books - on fascism, Chinese communism, hard science fiction...anything that would slake a thirst for knowledge except on roaches and arachnids. The word went down the line that a sucker was looking for a punch- in that body-bruising rain, I don't know how or who did the running: cellphones certainly weren't in view and nobody was doing any yelling.

Now for an aside: India's postal system goes back three and a half millennia, when kings had an established communication system between Egyptian Pharaohs and Chinese monarchs. They used all manner of transportation - horses, elephants, men, pigeons - and inducements, primarily smidgens of gold and Medusa's heads of whips and, failing all, threats of familial decapitation.

But the latter-day - centuries later actually, 150 years ago when the Indian Postal Service came into existence - mail, or dak, "runner" was actually the world's strongest baton carrier, or extreme athlete, pelting from station to station where he passed on his satchel of letters to the next runner, who went further, and so on, braving raging rivers - often drowning - tigers, bandits, every homo sapien-hater you could name. Jim Corbett himself once"impersonated" a runner, lugging along a lantern, an utterly inadequate spear, and a wrapping of letters, trying to track the spoor of a man-eater that had scarfed many runners.

Unless the tradition of runners survives on College Street, I have no way to explain why I was getting pulled into book dumps a good 10 - and more - shops down the pavement with sellers yelling, "Dada, books on Chinese communism, books on fascism, good rates..." and a great deal more of the commercial ballyhoo that comes from people trying to squeeze a living in this age of glitzy Barnes & Noble and the Oxford Book Store giving 75 per cent discounts on books that nobody wants to buy. Which wing-footed Hermes had told all these people that a bibliophile chump was busy trying to catch pneumonia pounding the cobblestones?

Well, basking in my irrigated glory as I was, there was one bookseller who didn't give a shit. Resting fatly and benignly below a teetering pile of books was one - a horror anthology of Frankenstein - I wanted to buy for my fiance, who has a taste for bloody books that would send war veterans haring for the horizon. Young lad, callow, I would like to think, the bookseller sat torso-nude in his shack. When I asked to see the book, and offered to help him retrieve it from below the pile, he scowled at me and said, "It's raining," (which I knew) and "hobe na" (won't happen), which I didn't. I stood around like a spaniel. Nary a difference it made to him. So I slumped onwards. When the rain eased a bit, I screeched round like a motocross bike and returned and made the same offer. He relented, we bargained, I bought the book - and he suddenly realised that he had relinquished an absolute pushover.

Allow me this rummage of observations, whichever part of the world you inhabit: 1) Pushovers can be very pushy when pushed too far; 2) If you love books, do yourself a favour and make a pilgrimage to College Street in Calcutta, thundershower or no; 3) Any Bengali who refuses attendance to a bibliophile is a farceur, and deserves to be paradropped among the Amazon's headshrinkers.

And, finally - nope, the books are not for sale.

On Hurricane Rita and 100-mile traffic snarls

The first thing I notice after I wake up this morning and pick up The Times of India's 'Times International' section - my favourite lunch wraparound since it carries the most edible part of the news, anyway - is the headline: "As Two Million Americans Try To Get Out Of Rita's Way, There's A 100-Mile Traffic Jam." Apart from being one of the longest and worst headlines I've read in years of being a journalist - didn't anyone inform the desk that it should have been a caption, for heaven's sake! - what neoned off the page was a three-column deep-shot AP photograph of a traffic snarl comprising everything from those rather large lurchers the Americans call "automobiles" and the rest of the world calls cars, humongous SUVs and semis and Mack trucks fading from Louisiana to heaven knows which collection of bivouacs and quonsets the Bush Administration would be busy misadministrating. There seemed to be something impolitic about so many four-wheeled brutes standing still and barfing out suspended particulate matter, no doubt contributing in no mean measure to the global climate imbalance that gave birth to Hurricane Rita, in the first place. But what was even more surprising was that only on the outgoing lane was there the bumper-to-bumper standstill that Hollywood loves to have its cops leap and thump and pirouette and occasionally butt-roll over. The incoming lane, on the other hand, was an absurdly empty stretch of halogen-lit aridity coloured bronze by the malignancy of the approaching storm, except for the silhouette of one truck headed the way of my breakfast.

Now, I think back to India: a single difference that makes both our democracies so contradistinctive - both lanes would have been packed, bumper-to-bumper - so to speak - with cars, buses skewed and limping on their axles, homemade contraptions with diesel-powered water pumps as engines, bullockcarts, autorickshaws with butts hanging out of every available opening, bicycles, and people walking with weights on their heads that would snap the thorax of an American quarterback. The point here is - both lanes, it was a matter of getting outta the way of Nature's natural termagancy, and damn the police and the rest of the catatonic administration.

The point also is that since India is improvident enough to suffer every year every calamity known to humankind - and a few other unknown bummers besides - there wouldn't have been this mother of all snarls. Every inch of macadam - and probably half the boggy countryside as well - would have been publicly requisitioned for evacuation. (Yes, there is public requisitioning - otherwise called "democracy" - here, distinctly different from another major 'democracy' where unquestionable government requisitioning is becoming quite the norm.)

I'm not for a moment suggesting that keeping one lane a haven of speed while locking up the other, or that keeping both lanes moving at snail's pace, is going to save more lives from ending up in messianic-government-designed distress. But I am interposing, I suppose, in the scheme of things that Hurricane Rita is hardly the last of the gyres of Gaia's distress - Nature is coming apart at the seams - and not the best laid plans of mice and men will keep single-lane discipline from saving humankind. Unless....