Saturday Nite

Saturday was spend at Gold Coast – Party. The word itself brought to mind noisy, half - naked revellers; it suggested the kind of empty frivolity and moral laxity of which I had been brought up to disapprove. It was my going away; I don’t know when I will see those faces again. Driving back Sunday afternoon, still hung-over and starving couldn’t help but think ‘if only’. Somewhere, in me with the ‘detachment is the key’ formula – kept thinking, if only, I had behaved, if only, I had realised the important things in life before loosing them – maybe, maybe – Miss West would still have been in my life. Excuses for the self-pitying bastard. Heading to Bombay next week – scared, excited, apprehensive, and eager all the emotions possible.

My old French friend – Sebastian, had once mentioned how India helped him become serious. One of the greatest things for him about coming to India had been, knowing about poverty and pain and suffering, and realizing that there is a whole world outside where people don’t even have the basic things in life. I mean, people keep seeing all those things on television, you know, those starving kids in Africa, but somehow one never gets close enough to really feel it. It doesn’t register much. It’s just out there on a map and you never really care as much as one should. And then you see it face to face and, boy, it knocks you out. Not many people get the chance to experience all this. In West, people are kind of trying to forget what pain and suffering are…keep…covers…only…real life…winners and losers…this…machismo…makes…pathetic failures. I mean spiritually, because one doesn’t allow oneself to suffer, experience pain.

In the months and years, since I met Miss West following the first evening, I was to see her in every mood and posture, in every kind of dress and at different times of the day; such rapt gazing as mine would leave a wealth of memorable images in my mind. But it is the picture of her sitting up very straight on her balcony, abstractedly plucking nibbles, the light from the city lights bathing her clear unblemished face in a golden glow that has stayed most vividly with me, and is the central force that illuminates her in my memory.

As I prepare myself to leave this city, a thin crimson – edged mist hangs over the river when I walk out of the house. The alleys leading to the main road is empty, the houses sunk in a blue haze, still untouched by the sun, which had already begun tentatively to probe the facades of the houses lining the river. I found my paradise and despair in this city. Morals, beliefs, principles were formed, tested, broken here. Mates made and lost, with Miss West beside me – I had a sense of serenity. Life, couldn’t touch me – was impregnable. Now I stare at the emptiness, isn’t this the déjà vu I have already experienced when I left Bombay, maybe just a degree more difficult and painful. Am heading back to Bombay, to find peace in all the carnage – oxymoron.

Mon Père

So many tangled roots our personalities have the social and emotional circumstances of our early years, of our parents’ lives, and, if you go back even further, of our ancestors’. In some sense, the emotion I feel these days, although never fully defined, has always been with me. It had cast its shadow upon my childhood, and it came to me then as a fear of being abandoned and unprotected. In later life, the fear lost its rawness; it became part of the larger preoccupations of a solitary adolescence. I had never analysed this fear; there had been no occasion to do so. It is only now as I write, and attempt to link disparate events and emotions, that I see the larger context to which it belongs, the long way it goes back, to a past that has grown dim in all except its broader details.

My ancestors were Khastriya (the title of the princely military order within the caste system. They are the warrior and ruling caste, in the traditional varna hierarchy.), originally from Kashmir. There were no dates for their exodus from Kashmir. We vaguely knew, by way of family lore, that the sixteenth-century Mogul invasion was one the reason for my ancestors’ migration to the foothills of Himalayas. No one, however, had any details. It wasn’t the kind of thing anyone care to document, or even remember, the past was too much a part of the present to be categorized in a strict historical sense.

For centuries, my ancestors had remained wealthy landowners in the flat lands enclosed by the foothills of the eastern Himalayas. During all that time, the turbulent history of medieval India touched them little. My own knowledge of that past went only as far back as my great-great-grandfather, in the last century, but I can’t imagine my his own ancestors deviated much from the well-worn Hindu groves in which he and his own son and grandson spent their own lives: studentship, adulthood and marriage, late-middle-age detachment and then the final renunciation followed by a retreat to the Himalayas.

With India’s independence in 1947, this regulated life was unravelled with bewildering speed. My grandfather and his sons found themselves thrown into the new ruthless go-getting world of independent India with none of their old certainties intact. Successive land reform legislation undermined the family’s assets to the point where ancestral jewellery had to be pawned off to pay for the education of my father and his brothers. There was a time when neither studentship nor marriage seemed a possibility.

My father grew up knowing both a kind of feudal grandeur and shameful penury. From a life of secluded leisure, he was catapulted into the ranks of desperate millions seeking jobs under the new regime. I did not know until after my mother revealed to me how deeply marked he was by that period of difficult transition.

In time, the years of struggle were left behind. He joined Air India; he worked his way to a kind of middle-class security and equilibrium. But he never spoke about his early years. Once, in an uncharacteristic burst of nostalgia, he mentioned the caparisoned elephant he once rode in the village. On another occasion, he spoke of the time he met Jayaprakash Narayan (widely known as JP, was an freedom fighter and political leader, remembered especially for leading the opposition to Indira Gandhi in the 1970s.) in Bombay. These memories alone come to represent for me the life he had known as a child.

The Romantics

Ye Dagh dagh ujala, ye shab-gazida sahar

Vo intizar tha jia ka, ye vo sahar to nahin,

Ye vo sahar to nahin jis ki arzu lekar

Chale the yar ke mil – jaegi kahin na kahin

Falak ke dasht men taron ki akhiri manzil

Kahin to hoga shab-e sust mauj ka sahil

Kahin to jake rukega safine-e-gham-edil.

This leprous daybreak, dawn night’s fangs have mangled –

This is not that long – looked – for break of day,

Not that clear dawn in quest of which those comrades

Set out, believing that in heaven’s wide void

Somewhere must be the stars’ last halting – place

Somewhere the verge of night’s slow – washing tide,

Somewhere an anchorage for the ship of heartache.

Je Ne Regrette Rein

As a boy I, used to be synonymous with a city - raucous, frenetic, and brazenly lively. Recently, however, I feel have became a park and seem determined to lead a quieter, more pensive life.

I captured the ribald vitality of Brisbane in my youth. I was once the embodiment of Brisbane's flaming youth. The permissive city Brisbane, to which the young boy fled from his family home, was the place where he cast off provincial inhibitions.

For the young Shirish, not much was sacred and no taboo went unviolated. Going back home, - will be all about taking stock of the situation: my life, my losses. I never understood death before, it was just another loss. I never really understood regret, guilt, remorse, heartbreak, abandonment, vulnerability. India, hopefully will sooth my professional and personal distresses. Excluding men from the central roles of my life, I have rounded up a sorority of submissive, adoring female mates, confirmation of my belief that women are communal creatures, sponsors of society, while men remain imprisoned in the testosterone-fuelled inferno of the ego. Speaking to people has had a curative effect on me. I shall try to absorb serenity from the townspeople. It will be like being back in my childhood, surrounded by all those people who used to sit on their patios and gossip. There was something almost spiritual about it.

I used to be a cheerful blasphemer, celebrating a convent as a lair of erotic and narcotic delights in dark nightclubs. Now I seem nostalgic for the consolations of faith.

But which camp do I belong to? Although I dote on my mother, my arrogant exercise of power links me with my angry, cold father, who used to be absent. As Wilde put it: 'All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.' Emotionally that may be my tragedy, too, but professionaly it is my good fortune. I ought to be grateful for all those unresolved conflicts, which will go on generating dramas.

I lost my grandfather last year. I lost the person who like Mother Earth, nurtured me, tended me, tried in vain to make me a better person. I came to realise the demon I had become – one with no values, no convictions and above all no honour.

Will I ever find peace? Will I ever be able to forgive myself - redemption is what I seek! Failed and flawed are the words I use to describe myself today.

The fun of being wrong

Have you heard the phrase a little knowledge is a dangerous thing? Well, a little English can lead to a hilarious situation. People unfamiliar with the language often express themselves in strange ways. Their intended meaning may be clear but what they’ve actually said is deliciously and delightfully different.

It seems hotel notices often get their English wrong. For instance, a bar in Tokyo claims: ‘Special cocktails for the ladies with nuts’. On its executive floor, the hotel proclaims: ‘You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid’. But it’s not just Asiatics who can’t handle the complexities of the Anglo-Saxon tongue. Consider this notice in the lobby of a Moscow hotel: ‘You are welcome to visit the cemetery where famous Russian and Soviet composers, artists and writers are buried daily except Thursday’. Unfortunately, the Swiss are no better. This was found in a hotel in Zurich: ‘Because of the impropriety of entertaining guests of the opposite sex in the bedroom, it is suggested that the lobby be used for this purpose’.

I thought the Scandinavians knew English well but this sign from a cocktail lounge in Norway suggests otherwise: ‘Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar’. However, the English doesn’t improve as you head south. The Budapest Zoo states: ‘Please do not feed the animals — if you have any suitable food, give it to the guard on duty’. In Rome, a doctor’s office states: ‘Specialist in women and other diseases’. A nearby laundry advertises itself as follows: ‘Ladies, leave your clothes here and spend the afternoon having a goodtime’.

Oddly enough, former British colonies fare no better. If you thought British rule ensured a good grasp of English think again. A restaurant in Nairobi says: ‘Customers who find our waitresses rude ought to see the manager’. A dentist in Hong Kong maintains: ‘Teeth extracted by the latest Methodists’. Even in our own dear Bombay you can find a restaurant which claims: ‘Open seven days a week and weekends too’.

My favourites come from two countries where there’s no reason to expect fluency in English. A tourist agency in the Czech Republic offers its services with the following promise: ‘Take one of our horse-driven city tours and we guarantee no miscarriages’. And then there’s this advertisement for donkey rides in Thailand: ‘Would you like to ride on your own ass?’

Now, the only thing that can better a mistake is famous people expressing themselves with a certain twisted pithiness. If the incorrect notices are funny, this is pure wit. Jimmy Carter’s mother, Lillian, once said: “Sometimes, when I look at my children, I say to myself ‘Lillian, you should have remained a virgin’.” Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR’s wife, is credited with the following: “I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: ‘No good in a bed, but fine against a wall’.”

Mark Twain was brilliant at this sort of thing. Try this: “Last week, I stated this woman was the ugliest I had ever seen. I have since been visited by her sister and now wish to withdraw that statement.” Here’s another: “Be careful about reading health books in case you die of a misprint.”

Not surprisingly, some of the wittiest comments have been made by the Brits themselves. For instance, Winston Churchill once said: “Don't worry about avoiding temptation. . as you grow older it will avoid you.” WC Fields: “I never drink water because of the disgusting things fish do in it.” Spike Milligan: “Money can’t buy you happiness, but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.” And, finally, Groucho Marx: “I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.”

This time my favourites are the ones that take something out of context and change its meaning. For instance, Victor Borge : ‘Santa Claus has the right idea. Visit people only once a year’. Or Socrates : ‘By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.’ And Joe Namath : ‘Until I was thirteen, I thought my name was SHUT UP’.

Oh well, have a great day!

Dirty Dick and Co get sanitised

PUBS were traditionally the riotous hubs of British social life; dimly lit and smoky dens that were pretty much a law unto themselves. But life is being squeezed out of them by a growing list of rules and regulations.

Police in Preston, Lancashire, want a ban on “vertical drinking” in the city’s pubs. Drinking elbow-to-elbow in groups, they believe, leads to spilt pints and thrown punches. If punters are sitting quietly and divided by tables, they are more likely to keep their tempers cool. The “alcohol project manager” of the Preston police said that the problem was “the proximity of other people when you are stood up, which is where the problems can start”. One would have thought that the proximity of other people was the whole point to a pub.

These were the places for singing, dancing, fighting, pub games such as dice and backgammon, even animal racing and duck shooting. They were also the places for private affairs, where business was done — both above and below the table.

Although many pub names remain the same, inside they are being transformed into sanitised, smoke-free, brightly lit places, full of lists of cans and can’ts. The imminent smoking ban is only the half of it. The city authorities in Glasgow have banned glasses in clubs and late-night pubs — so pints come in plastic containers and bottles are decanted into plastic glasses — and had plans to enforce this in all the city’s pubs.

Customers are being treated like children, in need of supervision and advice on how much to drink, what to eat, how to get home, and how to date in a correct and responsible manner. Glasgow drinkers are effectively being made to drink out of plastic beakers — that are unpleasant to hold and make the beer taste bad — in case they have a tantrum and throw their glass around. Yet the public house was traditionally that most adult of places, where teenage boys went to try to prove they were men.

One heartening thought is that it’s unlikely that punters will obey all these rules for correct behaviour. Next to a sign warning about door slamming I saw a young couple in what looked like the later stages of foreplay; a quiet journey home was the last thing on their minds.

Postcards from Sydney