tools to listen into...

I had bought iMic during the last visit to Australia. My PowerBook G4 does not come with an inbuilt microphone and for recording purposes I had to get this little gadget. Since then I have used it extensively for recordings, skype, etc. However, it was only yesterday that I optimized its full potential.

In 2001, from my first savings, I bought an Enbee music system. It consisted of a second hand amplifier (1977 model), a modest tape player, and brilliant speakers. The speakers were the most expensive of the lot. All three of these contraptions have their own lives, characters, and personalities. Since the very beginning, I just loved the fact that music wasn't a button away. The system is such that is requires constant engagement, to think about the wiring, the balance, the modulation. Also, because it was essentially a tape player (CD could be attached seperately), we (my flatmate and I) when we initially got the system and had no other social life would ponder over which tapes to play, in what order, what sides. We would have long discussions to and fro from work about which tape to pick out when and in what sequence. We sometimes even made long calls from our respective offices about the music we would play when we got back.

I am not sure it was since then or I had always been like that but I just love the old tapes. Don't get me wrong, I have a decent CD collection and a more than decent mp3 collection populated through years of begging, borrowing, and stealing. However, I still like to think about which music to play when. I like the whole process of going through tapes or CD's for that matter, reading the listings, the biographies, connecting with the memories that particular tape/cd evokes in me. It is for this reason, I will never buy a iPod or similar mass music storing and playing devieces. I can never listen to music casually, while on the plane, driving, reading, etc. I need to have the right seat, right book, right frame of mind, cigrattes on the right, ash tray in the flicking distance, a drink.

However. The point about iMic and Enbee (I haven't been able to find any relevant links for Enbee) is that yesterday I used my iMic to add stereo input to my computer. The brilliant thing is that through their software, Final Vinyl, I could record my old tapes in digital formats. These are the tapes/collection which are difficult to come by these days. If you get them, they are in the collection of thousands of mp3 all hurdled together.

It's nothing dramatic but I am just so kicked anyway for those small moments when I can sit with my enbee, plug in something, and breath new life into old songs!!

snippets

I had long, tensed conversation with my mother. She was trying to drill into my head that I need to comply to systems, be polite to people whom I detest with all my being, or worse still people who don't even exist for me. She was vehement about it almost as if she was on the edge. On asking why I should do all of these things, she could only muster a fake rhetoric of 'living in the society, living for others, doing all these things that when you need help, when you are old and dying these strangers can come up to you and help you'. I shouted back, rather impulsively, I don't owe any obligation to anyone, no one, I am going to lead my life to please me, to make myself happy. If I am not happy, how the hell is anyone else going to be happy around me.

I do believe in these things but later on thinking over the conversation, I realized, it wasn't as much about me that my mother was talking about. It was her. She is getting to that stage when old age, loneliness, desperation are real. When children do no hesitate to walk away unable to forgive you for the follies of their childhood. When partners cling to each other only because they have nowhere else to go. Worse still, they don't have the courage. The whole system of checks and balances which expects one to pay obligations, make appearances, be polite is to shatter anything vaguely resembling that courage to carry on without any appendages and without any support. It's not only my mother, I see people like that everyone around me. The situation just gets accentuated to the point of disgust in older people. I was like that for a while. I have been in relationships which suffocated me only because I dreaded being alone. Why is being alone so scary?

Why should one have to manage relations, people who mean nothing in the present so that in the future they might be of help? I am never going to go to these people anyway. Why are we required to wear skins and skins of pretensions only for a distant hope that when we are lonely and old they will provide a kind shoulder? This logic seems too hollow to me. I don't think I have been able to manage the most stable relationships but they have been courageous (I no longer use the word honesty, it is very easily contrived to suit ones own needs) to deal with the issues. I have been and so have been the others involved. I make a conscious decision, conscious effort to not base these relationships or sustain them so that they can yield some long term dividends for me when I am lonely and old.

For me, me and my relationships, my coordinates are going to be defined by the moment and not what lies beyond them.

the love within

These days I worry about the act of writing, I agonize over the form and the format, I want to learn more about writing, the art, I am no longer caught up in the self sown skins of never reaching out and living with the conviction that whatever of worth is there in me, is there. I don’t have to look for anything around, outside of me. A classic situation of inflated arrogance deflated confidence and minimal practice.

Whenever I read works, great or otherwise, with whom I can relate to, about whose authors and their lives I spend many hours contemplating about, I don’t give the author or their works a chance to live in me beyond that moment. What I mean is, it is easier for me to think that the author wrote the entire book, poem, etc in one sitting not allowing for moments of casual, mundane existence in between. I find it difficult to give the authors a chance at their lives. For me, when I am reading their works, that is all I have, that is all I think about, that is what I live for. I turn off to the entire world and to think that the same author spilled wine on carpet or tried to score with one of the hot chicks at a party is nothing else than repulsive for me. How can they do it? I give so much of myself and all they can go and do is lead a ‘normal’ life?

At least I used to think like that. I sometimes still do but I am beginning to relax and give the author credit beyond the book. In doing so, I have been able to understand the whole process of writing better. Writing is a creative act. It requires intensity, emotional courage, physical perseverance, and just simple consistency. There are writings, poems, prose, and ideas, essays, which can be thought of in the moment and written in that moment. However, with most of the writing, one needs to re-visit. I understand it now. Writing is also an activity, like any other creative practice, which needs patience. And more than that, the ability to go back to one’s work and tear it apart to mend the gaps. I did not have that faculty. If I wrote something, it would always be in an intense moment (if there wasn’t any, I would force the moment to its crisis), and I would never have the courage to go back to it. In doing so, I think I was exposing, by vehemently holding on it, my under-developed self-confidence. I could not believe that I could go and engage with my work, my writings, outside of the emotional peril I had to situate myself in to write. I did not have the confidence to write what I wanted to without being in an intensely emotionally cathartic situation. This sort of explains why I was not ready to give any other author that space as well.

These days I think about writing, I read what other authors have to say about writing, I hear people who have something to say about writing. I am not involving myself with these issues to learn the perfect format, perfect syntax, perfect tense to write the perfect book but there is an intense desire to understand the process of writing as it is stands for others. In reading, listening to these accounts, it brings about a more humane view of writing. I always used to think writing is something which should take you away from the world but now I am convinced that my vision was very narrow, writing should take you closer to the world, the world you live in, the world you imagine, the world you love.

Emerging from all these is the realization that it is not anti-creative to be calm, comfortable and relaxed. Before this year, I was unable to write if I was not pulling out my emotions from the depths of depression or melancholia. If I was comfortable and relaxed, I just wouldn’t be able to write. I felt empty and drained. I felt as I my entire existence was defined by the fluctuating modes of depression, agony, anxiety, melancholy, and loss. In doing so, I carefully cut down the borders of my own world. I could not see, feel the beauty within and that made it impossible for me to embrace it outside of me. In the three decades of my existence, I realize now, I have harbored only pain. I allowed only pain to reside in me. Love, I showed it the other way.

Now, I have embraced it.

I am allowing for the beauty in me to blossom, I am allowing myself to love with a conviction that I am safe, I am allowing myself to let the beauty around me undress me.

And in return, the myself in me is allowing me to write, think, live, without any prejudices and pretensions.

delhi by driving

I have formally initiated my fieldwork for my PhD. However, this is not a post about my fieldwork. It is about the processes, journeys and engagements from my first attempt at ethnographic research to the moment now where I am much better acquainted with the practice, theoretically, intellectually, and at the ground level of actually conducting research. It helps that I am a much more relaxed person as well. Age does have its benefits.

I have been in Delhi for long enough to know enough about it and feel lost in other cities and contexts outside of the comfort of the familiar. I came to Delhi from a small town where a visit to market implied that most of the people knew what you went shopping about. It had its charm, especially, when the gossip was about others. Personally, the Big Brother gaze made me nervous and irritable. I was just on the verge when literature is no longer about bed time stories but becomes a part of your life, defines your part of life, directs it. It was that stage when literature, poetries, commentaries gave the much needed solace from reality. I needed the intensity of passion, the spectacle of drama, the driving need to believe in something, anything. In short, I needed my space. The picturesque small town where I grew up did not give me that. It was around this time that after completing my school my family shifted to Delhi. One of the main reasons to do so was for me to undertake my higher studies, graduation. This itself was a major point of contention between my parents and me. The issue was what to study, what to specialize in, which subject will ensure I have a flawless career, substantial savings. Career, savings, bank balance, these things because I didn't have, didn't mean anything to me. They still don't. I am not suggesting that I don't care about money. I want to make enough money to never have to ask anyone for it. At that point, it didn't matter at all. My parents wanted me to pursue one of the science subjects. I, on the other hand, wanted to study either history or literature. After many discussions, my parents gave into History; studying literature, story books, as a graduate course was not acceptable. So, I set about settling in Delhi with a lot of histories to learn.

From the first sight of it, I loved Delhi. The anonymity, the vastness, the traffic; everything allowed you to loose yourself. I smoked my first cigarette in public without having to constantly looking over my shoulder or drowning myself in cheap perfume to hide the smell. I went on long bike rides with no so well known boys not dreading the relatives and not-so-good-friends. In the initial years of my association with Delhi, I was self-indulgent. I was exploring myself in the city. Not the city in myself or even the city in the city. At that time, I reckon, I had not even settled the city in myself. I was still exploring the corners and conversations. Every time I would go to a new area, a new connection with the city would be formed. At that time, I relied on public transportation to navigate my way across the city. So it were bus numbers carefully noted down on crumbled notes. Any secret rendezvous was designed around these connections; the bus timetables, the frequencies. In the initial years, I loved traveling in buses. The idea that hundreds of lives were bundled together in this steel, engine, fuel, and human concoction to approach different realities, different destinations, different loves without having to bother even the courteous glance was nothing less than liberating for me. A lot of my friends would plug in earphones while traveling on the bus. Not me. I wanted to hear the city conversations. I wanted to hear what the lovers were quarrelling about, whom the friends were gossiping about, where people were going, and the moments of exhilaration, the deepest fears and secret affairs. I guess without begin aware of it, I was indulging in the ethnographic voyeurism. Only that at that moment, I was the one who was researching myself. I wanted to know about my life through the million, different lives lived. I was slowly settling in. The city was slowly settling in me. Little did I know then that this was the love affair which would last a lifetime.

Once I got settled, I guess at some moment, I stopped being in so much in awe of the city. The surface was being scratched and I was getting a sneak peak into other politics, policies, and practices that make the city. With the anonymity came the dread and fear of being murdered, raped, or cornered. With the increasing traffic came the realization of the increased fuel prices and jams, the student life was not all about ha-ha-he-he it threw at my face, Marx and Hegel, Right and Left wing. I had to make my own choices, decisions. I was compelled to have an opinion. A lot of things, which I had taken, for granted, never had to engage with, were being carefully dissected. Class, caste, gender, and religion which if not a very important element of my everyday life but nevertheless omnipresent almost 'neutral' categories were now sites of theoretical, intellectual, and personal examination. A new prism and perspective, which was mine, in which I selected and rejected ideas and notion was forming. This was a very volatile period of my life. Everything I had taken for granted was being challenged by myself. I felt lost. I found myself feeling things, which I had never articulated earlier. It wasn't a metamorphosis of any sorts. I think I was just, finally, getting into my own skins. In my new skins, I found a new city in the city. This was the city were the connections between lives wasn't a romantic ambition but a reality. The corners were not secluded but were connected through many, many visible and invisible maps. One bang somewhere had a resonance elsewhere. However, my involvement with this city was as platonic as with the earlier city, which was settled in me now. These were also the days when I was experimenting with smokable stuff other than tobacco, lots of cheap alcohol, Salinger, burgess, Kerouac, Neruda. I was also on Prozac for a while, a fact, which I advertised, more than keeping it under wraps. Why should it be under wraps, anyway? So, evidently, reality was a bit blurred for me and so was the city in me, outside of me. I was living in a world where I did not bother to take the public transport anymore, I was much more at home wandering in the dark bushes and cold stones with strangers, where I wanted to cry out with Floyd instead of indulging in strange conversations, I was losing out on the city, in me, outside of me. I was living in insulated, isolated realities where the only thing mattered was my skewed emotions over others. I did gain something out of that phase in my life, I guess. Probably I indulged so much in myself during those three years that for the next few I was prepared to face the reality.

As of now, I seem to be the protagonist of this narrative. I am not. The city I have discovered in all these years. The city which I has settle in me and the city in which I have squatted.

My romantic, platonic association with the city came to an end with a sudden jolt. One day I had the security of a family, house, siblings, dogs, a future charted out. The next day I was living in boy's hostel. I was still studying. I had never worked before. I have never thought I ever would work. Even when I had thought of doing something, it went as far as heading a cult. So, in short, I had no idea with the real world, real city. Looking back now, I am glad that my relationship with the city, which now I am settled in and which is settled in me, was based on this jolt. At that moment, this incident of leaving the security of my parents home to fend for myself was the most significant thing that ever happened to me. However, I wasn't devastated. I felt liberated of moving beyond having to answer for everything, to be told, to confront, to cry. It was with this sense of liberation that I approached the city as well. Everything about it was enchanting for me. Now beyond my romantic and platonic prism, the city offered possibilities for someone like me who had no specialized knowledge, no skills, no substantial degree. In that initial period, the city epitomized the democratic spirit. I was excited. All the ideas of breaking the boundaries and creating one owns fluid zones seemed like a reality. But only till the time I started to look for a job and then for a place to stay. All kinds of prejudices and biases were thrown at my face. The fact that I could not give my parents reference as a social security to vouch for my character worked against me when I tried to get jobs. The fact that I was a single, young woman made a lot people not rent out their spaces to me. I represented the corrupting, moral influence of the day. I soon realized the territories in which I would feel safe. It was not only the matter of traveling alone at night or even at day time but the invisible security system which made me feel safe had been untimely terminated. I constantly felt alone and under threat. My careless romantic indulgence of trusting strangers was giving way to treating everyone with suspicion. I clung to my bag with no possessions a bit too tightly. I always tried to get the corner, window seats on the buses not so much because I wanted to look outside but because I didn't want anything to do with the insides of it. The overheard everyday conversations of family, friends, normal quarrels, regular lunches began to irritate me. I was beginning to get very agitated with the city. This was not the city, which I had allowed to grow in me, within me. It didn't embrace me with both arms; it didn't provide me with the corners where I could feel safe. Instead it constantly challenged everything I did. My being young, single, woman was used by many of the cities in the city. It was around this time that I first starting fantasizing about settling along the beach, walking on moon lit nights with flowers in my hair: a classic romantic get away situation. I knew I could not. I knew I would not. Though I wasn't settling very well in the city, the city had settled in me. There were still some auto rides, which made me feel light. There were still many bus drives, which didn't ask my name and didn't care where I went. There was a kindness, which would come to me from people, places at the most unwarranted hours and moments.

I would still find poetry in places. So I stayed and glad I am that I did.

Sometime in this phase, where my association with the city was based on caution and control, I started working in a research centre. A new media urban research centre. God only knows how I got that job. I had no idea about new media forget media at all, urban was a lived reality for me it wasn't a theoretical, intellectualized category for me. However, I got the job. I learnt a lot from working in this space. But still the reality of this space was far more distant than reality itself. The urban was there but it was a hyperbolic, displaced category. The new-media jargon had little with the everyday reality of what I saw. Maybe I didn't not see enough. Working in this space was like being on acid. It was a bubble suspended with no connections and contexts. Everything happened in its own context, when I wandered out, which I rarely did, I could not relate to it. People could not relate to me. Till date I don't know what was wrong, with me, with my reality, with this place. However, it was this place where I started engaging with spaces in the city within research agenda. It wasn't voyeuristic, romantic, highly personalized journeys but visits undertaken to understand something.

That was my first ‘ethnographic’ experience without even actually knowing what it entailed. At that time, I was working in a market place, which specializes in second hand hardware (computers) and pirated software. I was beginning to understand and marvel at the wonders of the digital technologies. I was fascinated by what bits of chips, bytes of codes could do. I sought and found poetry in it. I fell in love with these poets. So, Nehru Place, where these digital technologies had a canvas outside of the poetry and poets, an everyday reality to it completely enchanted me. The fact that this ‘ethnographic’ research wasn’t directed by specific research agendas and questions gave me the liberty and the freedom to explore many trends, trajectories. Not always the best approach but for a novice like me it was the almost the best self-taught ethnographic experience I could gather. As I progressed, the categories of field site, field visits, respondents, data collection, interviews, interpretation started gaining weight. I love and still loved the experience of Nehru Place. I still visit that space on a regular interval and every time I go, I see a new melody and hear a new story.

It was the experience of this space which instutionalized and internalized my voyeurism into a respected profession to follow through. However, it was not until I started working on an independent research project that I actually began to understand the nuances of ethnographic research. While conducting this research, which involved intense and intimate association with the everyday of people instead of technologies I had to learn to unlearn a lot of things. I was forced to investigate my own standing, background, prejudices, and perceptions. Through carefully following this trajectory of researching myself while conducting the research brought to fore front the politics of ethnographic research. I realized that as an ethnographer I need to pay particular heed to the methodology and practice of ethnography as it is in this very practice that the construction of categories is embedded.

With this understanding, I undertake yet another journey to explore yet another aspect of my city!

Property, representation, and serial killings

The connections are weak at the moment. They may seem like they will snap but please bear with me.

The last week of Indian media was dominated by the images of scurrying out skulls from a drain, a bearded man who had killed more than a few children and women, and a servant who took his job a bit too seriously and abducted, kidnapped, and killed on his employers orders. Yes, also, hordes of aggrieved parents, relatives, brothers, sisters, friends. But they were just the hordes: angry, stone pelting, demanding justice. The regular crowds of regular people.

Usually when I see these things, when I happen to be passing through a news channel towards clever comedy or tacky music, I get increasingly disturbed and most of the times I don't know what disturbs me in that moment. I think the constant onslaught of images of similar kind has led to a situation, which I like to call, sensory deprivation in me. The characteristics feature of this situation manifests in me through my inability to relate to these 500 images per frame thrown at me, not in the moment, not in retrospection. It just leaves a dull taste and that's about it and that also only lasts till the time I manage to find my comedy or my music.

In my present situation (of sensory deprivation), the only time I remembering actually looking at an image or beyond it was when one channel (and I am just assuming it was all the channels as well) were airing this news clip about a rescued young girl from the wraths of her employer. The employer couple, I think even their children (though I would like to spare them), would beat her up with sticks, chains, whatever they could lay their hands on, burn her with hot rod, etc. There she sat, the rescued girl, with scars so deeply etched on her that she didn't need to lift her little frock to show where they hit. Her eyes were splattered, I am not trying to be poetic, but there is no other word that I can use to describe what I saw of her. Her breathing was slowing down by the tears that were clogging her and the incessant questions of the reporters she had to answer. The reporter, who I am sure is a very considerate person in real life, was pushing down the huge mike (for better sound quality through the sobbing?) and repeatedly asking, 'so, did they beat you' (I don't understand why they have to ask questions as such, doesn't the fact that the news-piece is about the child being beaten and yes rescued through the efforts of the conscientious channel enough to establish that?), 'so, haan beta, yes, child, where did they beat you' (okay, I would still give this question some journalistic liberty) but the last question, 'did it hurt, my child' completely threw me off my saddle. Whose intelligence is one challenging, the reporter's, the viewer's or the child’s.

All of this questioning about the program, I am able to do at the moment but while the news clip was playing (and I could not even get my remote to do what it does, shift my attention), I just broke down. Not heavily, not sobbing but without my wanting to, the situation of sensory deprivation still gripping me, the tears kept coming. I have been beaten (thankfully by family member, how that makes it better, I don't know but still...) when I was young and not so young and I knew what exactly the child wanted. She didn't want to be questioned or even held but just some respect. Respect, darn' it. When you are that young and are beaten, the sense of helplessness grips you. You loose all groundings, if they were ever established, of love, trust, respect, honor. Only and the only thing that restores a bit of these lost moments is Respect.

Anyway, in regards to the present situation, I did not think much about it. I did not want to think much about it. I don't have children and do not fear whether they will suffer the same fate. My childhood, most of it, has been taken care of. But still, as I mentioned it earlier, it left a dull taste.

In reading two texts, E.M.Forester's My Wood in 75 readings and Tim Crane's The Mechanical Mind (sorry, the links to the books suck but will give an idea) (the first chapter, The puzzle of representation) I was struck by the following, a bit about the texts first:

Forester, after acquiring the first property he ever owned, A wood, is writing about how the ownership of the property makes him feel heavy, makes him want it, the property to be larger, and lastly, makes him want to do something about it, to extend the boundaries, to claim the territories over and over again. Crane is dealing with questions of philosophy, asking basically how the mind works? Can it be explained through the naturalistic, everything has its place theory, or through the higly mechanized, everything moves because of the motions it is made of or follows, mechanistic theory? In doing so, he raises significant questions about representation. Through trying to understand representations, Crane, aims to raise a few more questions about the working of the mind than offering solutions. How do we understand what an image, word, music represents? What allows for us to make immediate and effective connections between these and the ideaS?

What I drew from one strand of his theoretical inquisitions is that (and the point of connections to this long rambling), that representations of things, ideas, words, music, images (images as representations) are understood because they have a certain resemblance to the thing they are representing or are represented by. However, this resemblance is not enough (as a theoritical consideration and as everyday matter of articulation) to establish or reinforce the representation or the represented (Crane also suggested the same). In between resemblance and representation, there is an important link of interpretation, contextual interpretation. How I understand this (especially vis-à-vis the relations between the powerful and the not so powerful) is that representations are established, understood, and sustained through re-assembling resemblances to that 'thing' in different contexts (or even in one established contexts). These re-assembling and resemblances are carefully selected by the select few. And once these re-assembled resemblances are reinforced as representations they themselves begin to assume the convention of what that thing, word, image stands for.

So much for Forester and Crane.

In the present situation of the serial killer, it is interesting to note that he is placed against the hordes (the crowds) through the property associations and ownerships. The bearded man in questions, Mr. mohinder, was the owner of the rather lavish bunglow in the 'posh' colony of Noida, a suburban city to Delhi while all the victims were from the nearby 'urban village'. Owning this coveted property at the prime location is the only connection I can draw to his sense of confidence to dispose off the bodies in the drain right next to his house. Considering none of his neighbours ever complained about anything (there must have been an occassional shriek, the shovel moving, the children walking in and never walking out, which I am not ready to concede that none of the neighbours ever noticed) also has its roots in the largeness of the property Mr. Mohinder owned. Like Forester, property gave a sense of heaviness, largeness, and an authoritative right to do something about it (which Forester wasn't too happy with) to Mr. Mohinder and his neighbours. No knows about him, everyone claims they had no idea what he did, in short, his property, his lavish bunglow, was his fortess. I cannot help thinking whether the residents of the same colony, same area would have maintained the policy of diginified indifference and non-interference if a resident from the neighbouring 'urban village' would have attempted to do something of this sort. So, this is how Mr. Mohinder continued and continued with his sprees.

What about the hordes, the crowds? Why were their complaints not registered or followed? Obviously, this points out the pitfalls in the judicial and law systems. However, not going into that area, I would still like to reverse the situation and imagine if Mr. Mohinder was complaining about his missing son/daughter. Would the policemen still advise him to 'take care of their wards', 'make sure his daughters do not loiter around' or say, 'accept that your daughter was a prostitute only then we will register the complain?'. I think not. The story about the man, whose persistence apparently led to the developments on the case, who has nothing left in his village was made to admit (and sign, i think) statements saying that his daughter was a prostitute. They even played the recorded statement in his village. The policemen, for what I can think of only cheap thrills, were dutiful enough to carry the recorded tape to the man's village, arrange for the suitable technology to play it, but not investigate the matter where it was reported.

How does being a prostitute take away your legal rights?

And this is where, when people are denied the basic rights because some think they are of a certain kind, I think the convenient re-assembling of resemblances in regards to the people from 'slums', 'urban villages' as 'criminals', 'vagabonds', 'whores' is represented and has been re-presented over and and over again so much so that these now define the conventions.

Unfortunately, I don't have any solutions but only hope that homogenized, re-assembled resemblances, are not sought to represent reality, realities, on TV or otherwise.

Some links:
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1072356
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1014784.cms
http://premendra.sulekha.com/blog/post/2006/12/brain-research-serial-killers-noida-gurgaon-gutter.htm
(The traffic on this site is worth noticing if not an outright concern for worry)

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

From Dostoevsky's, 'The Dream of a Ridiculous man'. After
the musings yesterday sought Dostoevsky desperately and
like always his writings opened up further vents.

_______________

But my companion had already left me. I suddenly, quite
without noticing how, found myself on this other earth, in the
bright light of a sunny day, fair as paradise. I believe I was
standing on one of the islands that make up on our globe the
Greek archipelago, or on the coast of the mainland facing
that archipelago. Oh, everything was exactly as it is with us,
only everything seemed to have a festive radiance, the
splendour of some great, holy triumph attained at last. The
caressing sea, green as emerald, splashed softly upon the
shore and kissed it with manifest, almost conscious love.
The tall, lovely trees stood in all the glory of their blossom,
and their innumerable leaves greeted me, I am certain, with
their soft, caressing rustle and seemed to articulate words of
love. The grass glowed with bright and fragrant flowers.
Birds were flying in flocks in the air, and perched fearlessly
on my shoulders and arms and joyfully struck me with their
darling, fluttering wings. And at last I saw and knew the
people of this happy land. That came to me of themselves,
they surrounded me, kissed me. The children of the sun, the
children of their sun - oh, how beautiful they were! Never
had I seen on our own earth such beauty in mankind. Only
perhaps in our children, in their earliest years, one might
find, some remote faint reflection of this beauty. The eyes of
these happy people shone with a clear brightness. Their
faces were radiant with the light of reason and fullness of a
serenity that comes of perfect understanding, but those faces
were gay; in their words and voices there was a note of
childlike joy. Oh, from the first moment, from the first
glance at them, I understood it all! It was the earth
untarnished by the Fall; on it lived people who had not
sinned. They lived just in such a paradise as that in which,
according to all the legends of mankind, our first parents
lived before they sinned; the only difference was that all this
earth was the same paradise. These people, laughing
joyfully, thronged round me and caressed me; they took me
home with them, and each of them tried to reassure me. Oh,
they asked me no questions, but they seemed, I fancied, to
know everything without asking, and they wanted to make
haste to smoothe away the signs of suffering from my face.

IV

And do you know what? Well, granted that it was only a
dream, yet the sensation of the love of those innocent and
beautiful people has remained with me for ever, and I feel as
though their love is still flowing out to me from over there.
I have seen them myself, have known them and been
convinced; I loved them, I suffered for them afterwards. Oh,
I understood at once even at the time that in many things I
could not understand them at all; as an up-to-date Russian
progressive and contemptible Petersburger, it struck me as
inexplicable that, knowing so much, they had, for instance,
no science like our. But I soon realised that their knowledge
was gained and fostered by intuitions different from those of
us on earth, and that their aspirations, too, were quite
different. They desired nothing and were at peace; they did
not aspire to knowledge of life as we aspire to understand it,
because their lives were full. But their knowledge was
higher and deeper than ours; for our science seeks to explain
what life is, aspires to understand it in order to teach others
how to love, while they without science knew how to live;
and that I understood, but I could not understand their
knowledge. They showed me their trees, and I could not
understand the intense love with which they looked at them;
it was as though they were talking with creatures like
themselves. And perhaps I shall not be mistaken if I say that
they conversed with them. Yes, they had found their
language, and I am convinced that the trees understood them.
They looked at all Nature like that - at the animals who lived
in peace with them and did not attack them, but loved them,
conquered by their love. They pointed to the stars and told
me something about them which I could not understand, but
I am convinced that they were somehow in touch with the
stars, not only in thought, but by some living channel. Oh,
these people did not persist in trying to make me understand
them, they loved me without that, but I knew that they would
never understand me, and so I hardly spoke to them about
our earth. I only kissed in their presence the earth on which
they lived and mutely worshipped them themselves. And
they saw that and let me worship them without being abashed
at my adoration, for they themselves loved much. They were
not unhappy on my account when at times I kissed their feet
with tears, joyfully conscious of the love with which they
would respond to mine. At times I asked myself with
wonder how it was they were able never to offend a creature
like me, and never once to arouse a feeling of jealousy or
envy in me? Often I wondered how it could be that, boastful
and untruthful as I was, I never talked to them of what I
knew - of which, of course, they had no notion - that I was
never tempted to do so by a desire to astonish or even to
benefit them.

They were as gay and sportive as children. They
wandered about their lovely woods and copses, they sang
their lovely songs; their fair was light - the fruits of their
trees, the honey from their woods, and the milk of the
animals who loved them. The work they did for food and
raiment was brief and not labourious. They loved and begot
children, but I never noticed in them the impulse of that cruel
sensuality which overcomes almost every man on this earth,
all and each, and is the source of almost every sin of mankind
on earth. They rejoiced at the arrival of children as new
beings to share their happiness. There was no quarrelling, no
jealousy among them, and they did not even know what the
words meant. Their children were the children of all, for
they all made up one family. There was scarcely any illness
among them, though there was death; but their old people
died peacefully, as though falling asleep, giving blessings
and smiles to those who surrounded them to take their last
farewell with bright and lovely smiles. I never saw grief or
tears on those occasions, but only love, which reached the
point of ecstasy, but a calm ecstasy, made perfect and
contemplative. One might think that they were still in
contact with the departed after death, and that their earthly
union was not cut short by death. They scarcely understood
me when I questioned them about immortality, but evidently
they were so convinced of it without reasoning that it was not
for them a question at all. They had no temples, but they had
a real living and uninterrupted sense of oneness with the
whole of the universe; they had no creed, but they had a
certain knowledge that when their earthly joy had reached the
limits of earthly nature, then there would come for them, for
the living and for the dead, a still greater fullness of contact
with the whole of the universe. They looked forward to that
moment with joy, but without haste, not pining for it, but
seeming to have a foretaste of it in their hearts, of which they
talked to one another.

In the evening before going to sleep they liked singing in
musical and harmonious chorus. In those songs they
expressed all the sensations that the parting day had given
them, sang its glories and took leave of it. They sang the
praises of nature, of the sea, of the woods. They liked
making songs about one another, and praised each other like
children; they were the simplest songs, but they sprang from
their hearts and went to one's heart. And not only in their
songs but in all their lives they seemed to do nothing but
admire one another. It was like being in love with each
other, but an all-embracing, universal feeling.

Some of their songs, solemn and rapturous, I scarcely
understood at all. Though I understood the words I could
never fathom their full significance. It remained, as it were,
beyond the grasp of my mind, yet my heart unconsciously
absorbed it more and more. I often told them that I had had
a presentiment of it long before, that this joy and glory had
come to me on our earth in the form of a yearning
melancholy that at times approached insufferable sorrow;
that I had had a foreknowledge of them all and of their glory
in the dreams of my heart and the visions of my mind; that
often on our earth I could not look at the setting sun without
tears. . . that in my hatred for the men of our earth there was
always a yearning anguish: why could I not hate them
without loving them? why could I not help forgiving them?
and in my love for them there was a yearning grief: why
could I not love them without hating them? They listened to
me, and I saw they could not conceive what I was saying, but
I did not regret that I had spoken to them of it: I knew that
they understood the intensity of my yearning anguish over
those whom I had left. But when they looked at me with
their sweet eyes full of love, when I felt that in their presence
my heart, too, became as innocent and just as theirs, the
feeling of the fullness of life took my breath away, and I
worshipped them in silence.

love letters

This is from the archives of the loves I have been recently visiting. I wrote this for someone, without hope or agenda, a few years back and sent it much after it could ever mean anything. The person in question has shunned me ever since. I haven't questioned the person's motivations but cannot help wondering what it was that was so disturbing. Or disgusting.

I could not finish it then. I still cannot. Maybe it, the loves, defy the deliberations of beginnings, middle, and end.

__________________________

In between the redness of the moon


I reach out to you in honesty with twisted arms that can no longer carry the weight of the shoulders, which carry the world beyond them. And in this, I know, I am being vain. Honesty is the indulgence of the vain, don’t you think? Thin people, fat people, people with no soul, people with million eyes yet no sight use honesty to proclaim their superior position over the lesser mortals. As if to shout and tell everyone of their enlightened state of beings. Of the stars that shine on and for them. I fear that people who lay fanatic claims to honesty are the ones who can clamour the streets to demand the bloods of the outcasts. The liars. And I dread that. Why? Because I think I am one of the outcasts for these fanatics? I don’t know. I don’t know yet.

Yet. When I write to you I proclaim honesty. Am I changing sides? Am I becoming one of the fanatics? No, I dread not. The honesty I profess is the one that fills my soul when I pass a familiar smell. The honesty I believe in is the one that makes me count the endless stars and have a number. The honesty, which makes my bones stiff upright and straight, is the honesty with which I gaze in the eyes of the children who wave out to me or at times curl their toes out of numbness. In the stifling lights of the sun that creeps in through my glass doors I reach out for an overflowing pen and wipe it on my tangled hair. Then. In that moment. I know I am being honest.

I have restrained myself from spilling the lives and loves sought on to the paper with your name engraved on it. When you have sent me a message, I have held it close with open eyes and opened it with close eyes. I have seen you writing to me sitting at borrowed desks cascading through our collective memory. I have wondered and wanted to know the details you remember of the snatched moments we have spent together. You are and will always remain a stranger to me. And why, I have asked myself? Is there no way I could have known you better? There may have been but I do not want to tread on those paths. I relish the surprise with which your memory (the moment) takes me. Walking down the crystal clear paths with reflective surface throwing around many more of me than I can handle, I catch a glance of the singing butterfly in the mirror shop and I swallow your name. I cannot in those moments conjure up skins for you. I can only swallow what I already have of you in me. In each message I have sent to you I have left a secret calling. If you scratch the edges, hold the message uptight and twist it in the moon-shadow walks, you will hear them calling out to you. There is a poem, a song, a yearning, a desire in each of these messages I have departed for you. Have you felt them? Have you? Or did you leave my messages on the kitchen top to have covered coffee conversation stains? Did you lift and drop them mercilessly in conversations when you dreaded being stale? If you did, don’t let me know. From where I feel it, they are nicely tucked in satin and stars under your pillow. For me, my love, let them be over there. Do not take that away from me.

I have known you a decade and a half. Have I known you for so long? A smile crosses my blackened lips and I roll the tobacco in which I will taste you. I still remember the first day, first moment, when you cracked open the wounds in my skin. I was then celebrating a lost love. Yearning and mourning for it not because I felt it but because it was a ritual of discarding the dead skins I had accumulated through the telling touches and the calling out. I saw you walk into a borrowed room where walls were incestuously woven into each other where the lizards where the spectacle for some. Did you walk in? Did you stride in? Once you had entered did you dissolve into the background? Why did it take me so long for you to feel your presence? You, standing in the corner, reticent and reluctant, angry and aggrieved. It was my corner in those borrowed walls that you had occupied and when I tried to slide into it half way through being thrown out of my galaxy having smoked the grasses of the netherworld, I touched you. I did not feel you then. Just my skin felt the sensation of the blood running down your streams. My mind was too numb to acknowledge, the body reacted. The body, in that instance, was beyond the mind and it craved for more. I saw the longing in your blank eyes and deep curls. You looked straight into my eyes and I responded. We both were strangers to one another and were not yet caught in the systems of shame and guilt which knowingness brings. Not yet.

Beyond that moment, I loose recollections. I only remember dreams of dreams of you and I entangled in pleasure in that corner. Soon enough I lost the borrowed walls and with it the corner as well.

When did we meet again? Did you call out or did I reach to you?

I saw you again since then through half broken glass and shattered hearts. Sometimes you were picking up the pieces while I was at my masterpiece. We laughed through drunken conversations and I scratched your hands with my unkempt nails. Did you feel me then? Did the blood make you cry? We shared a many too beds. Broken and bereaved. We slept through the nights the demons wearing out the passion. You never touched me and I never cried out. Maybe I should have. Then, hopefully, we would have eaten the icing off the same chocolate dreams.

The evening has abruptly fallen into the platter from somewhere. One moment I looked out of my glass walls and I saw the cloud scoops laid out for the childish indulgence of dream scattered, clear ice-creams. Now everything lies in the middle of nothingness, there is no day to look forward to and the stars are shinning elsewhere. This time of day makes me nervous and search out for sheets that will curl me in sleeps to wade the day off. How convenient would it be to wear out days, then I would just wear out layers and layers of days that keep me away from you. That stand between us, in-between us, mocking at my plight, seeing me writher and squeal with both pleasure and pain. It reminds me of the state I am in, I was in, I will be in, a suspended reality of temporal being. In nothingness I am defined and in desperation I seek for you. The night we spent together celebrating the long flight of a friend for you and lover for me comes to my mind. The loves I sought then was made of translucent skins and tiny hands. Was it love? Was I in love with the idea of love? Or was I just unable to let go of the anchors that held my sanity? I know not what it was in the moment but when I live the night under your skin, I know that you knew that I was going to slip it away. That world for me will come to an end. The translucent skins will turn blue and black. Why did you not tell me then? Why did you not hold me and shrug off the actors and the acts in the head? Did you want me to suffer the endings as I slipped through the beginnings? For that love I borrowed lines from somewhere and cried out to crowds one night, `nobody, not even the rains, have such small hands’. And that moment has made it impossible for me to borrow, shamelessly, those lines for you. Or the other loves I sought.

Instead I write,

`how can I feel so much when you feel so little’

Another borrowed line. Another burrowed text.

In reading texts of inane pleasure and high theory, I have unveiled the sub-text of love and its longings. A line, a word, a phrase (half baked and carelessly thrown away) catches my attention and I latch on to it thinking through the entire text, the whole theory through that cut out glass. I do not have the patience for the whole. I dread the endings to stare at my face and mock my incompetence. Instead I draw an entangled web of ideas and images through my nocturnal pickings. In the morning, I am convinced that I have conquered. While the mirror tells me otherwise. I never remember the names and the references of these texts. I also forget too easily the ones I loved too passionately. The only things you forget are the ones, which you were convinced, you will never. And because of this deep conviction you never bother to remember them. They come back to haunt you uncalled for and unannounced. You, my love, I have never forgotten to remember and loved slowly. At the pace which the rains leaves there mark on un-cleaned windows, seasons after season. I have let you live in me. I have let you alive in my memories and in my makings. In everything I have become, in each flight I undertook, I carried some of you in me. Unlike others whom I have allowed untimely and brutal death I have caressed and cuddled you.

Dearest so, do you remember the night we laid out our fears on the brazen, cold rocks? Amidst the star lit moon, you held me close (my orange-ness seeping through you) and said, `it’s not about sex’; in that moment I wanted to shout out, `only if’. I could not because the closeness made me feel things I never have. It made me look into the beauty of things, which did not exist. And then you left. I connected through you crackling voice and you said you were leaving. Another someone you had touched out to (or not) poured over my soul and said that you both had become star-crossed lovers. I did not understand the exit. I could not claim it as mine exclusively. So I dropped it in between the glowing neon signs and helpless glances. I sought new loves with an animal ferocity while diminishing the ones I already had. I told homespun lies to naïve travelers. Created the stories of demons and devils and the little princess. I let them touch my hands under the dirty table linen and then allowed them to clean themselves with it.

And in middle of all this I spent one night crying on the wet grass staring at the broken street lamp singing, all I really wanted was some love. I did not mean it then. It was a rhetoric I use to wade away the present lovers to tell them that I did not find love in the smells of their underarms. And now, do I mean it? I don’t know.

Of the loves

Neruda did it again. Flipping through the thin volume to distract myself from other pressing commitments, I fell in love with love, all over again. Who cannot, will not, after reading this:

I do not love you as if you were brine-rose, topaz,’
XVII From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’


I do not love you as if you were brine-rose, topaz,
or barbed carnations thrown off by the fire.
I love you as certain hidden things are loved,
secretly, between night and soul.

I love you like the flower-less plant
carrying inside itself the light of those flowers,
and, graced by your love, a fierce perfume
risen from earth, is alive, concealed in my flesh.

I love you without knowing how, whence, when.
I love you truly, without doubts, without pride,
I love you so, and know, no other way to love,

none but this mode of neither You nor I,
so close that your hand over my chest is my hand,
so close they are your eyes I shut when I sleep.



If you didn’t, if you don’t every time you read it, don’t tell it to me. To anyone. Just run through the taste of the poem in your mouth and you’ll know what you missed. Or are missing.

After 29 years of hopelessly falling through one maze or other, looking for the love that beckoned me, I have conceded to the realization that it was not ‘love’ in someone or something that I was seeking. It was ‘love’ itself; in its nameless-ephemeral existence. In its long and short, I love the whole ‘love’ deal. In my younger days, I would spend hours at random bus stops, refusing to rush into the ones which promised me to reach me to my destination, waiting for the knight in shinning amour to ride me away to the moon. In my waiting, never did I think that it was a figment of my own wrapped imagination. I genuinely believed in the moment. I genuinely believed in love. Not knowing what I meant by it. Not understanding what I felt with it. Or what I would do with it when it happened. All I knew I wanted to love.

With the growing-up-years, one acquires bitter-sweet skins. The accumulating age makes it difficult to shed these skins with the abandonment that one dances in the rain when is young and the outside world a hyperbolic space-ship reality. In my case, the bitterness of the skins prevailed. Even then, I did not give up on love. Only I lost out on love because the bitterness made it difficult for me to embrace love: love of myself, love of others, love for myself, love for others. In this phase, I loved with a vendetta. I sought the soft corners of love that the others had carefully folded in their satins and stained them. In some situations did not give up till the time I had torn those satins into shreds. No one lost anything except me. These people with the soft folds knew and felt love. And once you know that, you can tie together the loose ends with borrowed strings to spread your wings. I, me, myself in my self-induced reality derived moments of obscene pleasure or intense pain through these acts; both these emotions, I constantly evoked to seduce myself with the idea that I felt/knew/lived with love.

Little did I know then?

I am older. Though I still carry the bitter-sweet skins, they are breaking up. When I let myself cry aloud, I can taste the bitterness, sometimes even the sweetness. I cannot still say that I understand love in all its ways but at this moment, I am eager to learn; to let the loves emerge out of their swarms and take me by the nape and sling through my hair. I pay close attention to love these days. I look out from where I sit and watch a girl with cheap golden hair, melancholic songs and cigarette and imagine her loves. Her lives. Which one of the loves is she suffering? What is love, a question asked so often without ever reaching to an answer that it has almost become rhetorical. I have learnt about loves in many different corners through many half-baked conversations. But still I cannot say what love is. Not authoritatively.

Love in its most basic, primal sense evokes an intense physical sensation. This sensation makes one feel light-headed to weightless, sometimes when one is mourning the love it is an immense heaviness. But love when shared, consciously and deliberately, varies in its manifestations. It is the matter of how much you let yourself love and fear which decides whether you let your love your die an untimely death, whether you live with it as one lives with the routine of daily breakfast or whether one practices it. The practice of love is an entirely different universe than living with love. Loving, itself, another constellation.

I have lived with love and practice it religiously. I have stabbed loves even before they developed their fangs. But at this moment, in these white nights of my life, I have been propelled into that another constellation of just loving. Loving, revering, celebrating, Love, as it has never been done before. My love is no longer directed towards an end, a consequence, a name, some soul and flesh. In doing so, I am aware, I am isolating the constellation. I am the only one who counts the stars and wanders the way on dark nights. Or the mornings. But in doing so, I am allowing myself to love in ways I thought wasn’t possible. With these loves, come the fears, the anxieties, the loneliness, the desires, not for anything/anyone but for allowing all the pores in your self/your soul to receive the nectar of the loves. I am excavating myself from the depths of the dead seas in which I had let it languish. It is by no means an easy task. I am constantly confounded by me in its many avatars. I have the power to exercise the excuse that ‘it wasn’t myself at that moment’ but with no audience, no patient rum-soaked hearings, these sound jaded to me and on a closer look and feel, I can pull out the me standing behind the closet. There are times even when I don’t recognize myself but that is not so much because it’s not me but because I would like it to not be me. Such is the loves that have overtaken me at the moment that I even love that me. I am ready to forgive, myself. I cannot still contain others. But I have allowed myself to love the ones who hated me, hurt me, and hid me.

While driving down the streets or staring from up above, an odd sound, a strange name, a familiar sight makes me fall hopelessly in love. In moments as such either I walk the ways with the loves of the past or create new ones. With the loves of the past, I do not try to mend things, I don’t cry and plead, I just walk behind, swallow the taste of it in my mouth and let the sensation take over me. When the time comes, I let go of it. Not without a tear or a heaviness in the heart.

With the new ones, I begin at the beginning. I let myself be absorbed in the depths of contemplation and speculation that comes with it. I let myself smile incessantly and then, immediately, breakdown in inconsolable sobs. I let the love that holds me in that moment live beyond it’s life. Like an idea, I stretch the love to its extreme, to allow for it to have a life of its own. Sometimes it wavers off, attaches itself to a passing boy, on other occasions it stays with me, refusing to let go, announcing itself suddenly and demanding the whole of what I have to offer.

All in all, I just have a sensation, a sense to cherish to smoke with my cigarettes and sip with my rum on stark white nights. And the daylights.

comfort zones

After spending long hours contemplating on the last post, I hastingly sent mails to friends, ex-friends, lovers, ex-lovers, acquaintances hoping that they all were safe and sound, that all of them had found their comfort zones in the chaos that prevails. My sentiments are genuine and concern heartfelt. However, having written those mails I was struck by the indifferent annonymity I treat the 'casualities' with. Constantly thrown at my face as numbers, they become numbers, just numbers.

Here I am trying to move beyond the counting. I sincerly put forth my hopes, empathies and prayers for anyone and everyone who was involved, directly or indirectly, in the casualties.

the city under attack: new geographies.

This is one of the longish posts I have written for the list, multiplicity (http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/multiplicity_listcultures.org), which Jinna, Sean and I run together.
_________________

11 July 2006: a rather inconsequential day. Another day in another month of another year. However, in one city, for the extended families of ‘146’ deceased, this day will be marked as history. It will also make the histories for the concerned to come. For the city of ‘mumbai’ or ‘bombay’, depending on which nomenclature one prefers, this ‘date’ will set marker for being under, yet another, ‘siege’ and coming out of it heroically.

What does it do to a ‘city’ when it is ‘bombed’? When lives, connections and intersections are put at temporary halt? Jo Tacchi’s evocation of talking about ‘as though the city itself was attacked’ is an interesting entry to try and understand what happens to the ‘city’, the ‘cities within the cities’, the ‘lives in the city’ when something as such happens. It also refers to the problematic of dealing with the ‘city’ as a monolithic, sonorous entity; as a fog horn on whose back we all ride our destines. The images, cut-copied-pasted, of a ‘monolithic’ city do not go far from representing the city in it’s hyperbolic imagination as a giant which will wake up one of these days to claim all our dreams. Maybe the nightmares. Neil Gaman in one of the Sandman series dealt with the issue, ‘if the city-dwellers can dream about the city, then it is possible that the city can dream as well’. The journeys a protagonist caught in the web of city-dreams jolted me out of my senses like no other ‘horror’ or ‘science-flick’ had done. And that was because, it all seemed real. It was a possibility that the depilated buildings that I sought for my illicit sojourns could be one of the mazes to move in (or out) of the city-dreams. Or the city dreaming.

While most of the people engaged with the ‘city’ discourse attempt at finding the ‘multiplicities’ and ‘polarities’ of the cities within the cities, consciously or subconsciously, everyone gives into the imagination of the cities within the cities as a City. I am struggling to develop vocabularies through which this binary of City vs. cities within city can be dealt with it all its polarities and possibilities. The media reportage and representations of the bombings in a city, whether it be London, Delhi or Bombay (Mumbai) open still further contours in this discussion. I will use a personal anecdote to explore these contours further.

Last year in October (29th), Delhi was bombed at several places. I was recently married and desperately trying to settle the familial abode. Acquainting myself with the ‘obligations and duties’ that come with the social-cultural construct of marriage. Part of this obligation was to have one of my husband’s distant cousin stay with us. I can’t say I liked him. I can’t even say I didn’t. He was one of the nicer guests one could wish for. Quiet. Reserved. Undemanding. Accommodating. He worked in one of the factories as the labour managers. Owing to the lack of interest and conversations, when he informed me about where he worked he set very vague directional references. I think I said almost arrogantly that I had never been to that side of the city. He did not offer any more information. I did not seek any. With the initial jolt of a guest coming and staying with you settling into a pattern, we conveniently continued in our silenced acquaintance. However. On the day (actually evening) of the blast, I was sitting reading something or lamenting on my ‘married’ status, when my husband rather frantically called me to switch on the television. At that time I was making very strong pleas to have the television banished from our familiar abode so this request raised a few frowns. The frantic plea in his voice, however, made me wait till later to subject him of my wrath. I asked, ‘what is the issue?’. ‘Delhi has been bombed’. Quite ashamedly, I have to admit that even this did not bring me out of my reverie. In today’s age of saturated, blown images and ideas, I thought it was yet another ploy by the various media agencies to increase their TRP’s; that the situation was not as critical as the frantic plea in my husband’s voice. I informed me about the places where the bombings had taken place, this, that, and yes, that one too. He then said, X, his cousin, works in this place and his colleagues have informed him that he has boarded the bus (one of the blasts took place on a bus) minutes before the blast took place. This did shake me out of my reverie. The place, Govindpuri, is well known to me or at least I thought. The images on the various new channels referring to Govindpuri did not seem familiar to me at all. As hard as I tried, I could conjure up references to the ‘site’. For the next few hours, my husband and I sat glued to television, reaching out to the phones to get any information about X. We called up as many people we knew to get any information about the coordinates of the ‘place’. From where, where to, etc. Nearest police station, hospital? Acquaintances who lived in the area, friends who would have friends in ‘influential’ positions in this area. We were populating our knowledge about this ‘new found’ place. It’s importance heightened because we were looking for something, probably, gone missing in this new place. In short, we were charting out new geographies into the city, into the cities of the cities, where we both have lived for more than a decade. Along with charting new geographies we were also marking new memories with this new-found place. We were not mere spectators to the ‘sensationalized’ news items about the bombings; we were active participants and producers of new associations, histories, memories based on the probable loss of X to this calamity. Fortunately, X strolled into the house and in our lives again unscathed and smiling unable to fathom our anxious looks or anger outbursts.

Through this one brief incident of ‘inactively’ being involved in the calamity brought forth a series of emotions and inquiries. How much of the city do I know of? How does one react in situations of crisis? Never again was I ever able to look at the city or the calamities it goes through with a beatific de-attachment. I was violently thrown out of my comfortable-middle-class-suburban-guarded by ‘private’ watchmen’s existence and this was when I was looking for someone whom I did not ‘feel’ much about. What about the loved one? I could (can) not even think about the possibility.

The point I am driving at using so much of space for personal introspection is that through incidents like this, the City is suddenly desecrated into categories; the site of incident and those that were spared, safe and unsafe places. New geographies are mapped out and newer histories charted. This is not only the case at the ‘local’ city level, even global new geographies of terror are marked out in red. In the case of yesterday’s Bombay blasts, it is linked to the London blasts, the Srinagar massacare (which the international audience may or may not be aware of). I am not a political theorist. I do not understand very well how the economy of terror and repression works. However, I have an idea about how ‘fear’ and ‘terror’ are circulated at an everyday level. Through their constant reiterations, ‘things’, ‘people’, ‘places’ become dangerous. Everyone, till proven otherwise, is a suspect.

However, amidst all of this fear psychosis, there are images and incidents that sustain one’s faith in humanity. In the humanness of everyone. In the goodness. In Bombay, people went out of their ways to help each other. Strangers, the prime suspects, were embraced and offered everything from material to moral support. The media coverage kept repeating in awe and shock, admiration as well, about the good deeds of the Mumbai-wallahs. The tone in which it was said did not hide their disbelief. It almost came across as if in such times of crisis, one is supposed to hole up in their sanctums and wait for the crisis to walk away. It, however, doesn’t happen so.

And while I reach the endings of this post, sitting in Delhi almost 1300 kilometers, a few million cities away, I notice a pretty girl at a distance standing on her balcony, playing a typically melancholic song, smoking her cigarette. Mourning a lost love? On the other end is an old man in a floral printed shirt jumping up and down to the tunes of the rains, which have finally appeared to provide some solace from the persistent heat, to scare away a few untamed dogs. Or is he playing with them? What are their cities? Where do they belong? Where do I?

Till then, to the spirit of the City, the sites of the cities and the new geographies being sustained.