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.
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Monday, October 03, 2005
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.