Proposal From Calcutta by
Pranshu Arya
© 2007 Pranshu Arya
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–2
Proposal from Calcutta
We sat facing one another across the square glass coffee table–the kind found in some variation in every contemporary apartment in every major cosmopolitan. We made small talk over tea. Her tea was much too plain and made opposite to my preference–too much milk and hardly any sugar; she hadn’t asked how I wanted it and I hadn’t volunteered myself. I arrived just a half hour before, showing up right at her door on the 20th floor of her high-rise. (I had told her I would do so because I didn’t want to trouble her, but the truth was I designed things this way because I considered well in advance about how conducive each situation we would find ourselves together in would be to conversation. I thought that I would prefer to get the niceties over with in the comfort of her apartment, where we would be alone, spared from the distracting din of fraught travelers at the airport, or even just a taxi driver listening to us.) She greeted me with a hug and an elated “Hey!” That was the first bomb. I never like a girl I’m interested in being so casual with me. But still it was better than “What’s up?” or something along those lines, I thought. I knew her from college. We had met many years ago but hadn’t gotten to know each other very well. For several years I had no news or care or even a thought of her. Then suddenly, when I was visiting old friends still in college town, she had popped up, and I found myself pleasantly attracted to her. She was curvier, prettier, more of a woman. I had told one friend that she could plainly tell her, when she saw her and if the opportunity arose, that I found her attractive and would be interested in seeing her. That possibility hadn’t arisen. “How was your flight?”
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“It was fine. A lot of waiting but that’s to be expected in this country. How are you? How do you like Calcutta?” “I’m good, I love it here! It’s Kolkata, by the way.” “I know…I just like the old names better. It’s just obstinacy on my part to change.” The second bomb. She loved it here. Another thing I don’t like to hear is how much she loves it or how much fun she’s having or anything of that sort, because, after all, it’s all happening without me. What was there to love here anyway? From my initial reaction (taxi-ride from the airport to her place) I hadn’t seen anything to fall in love with. “That’s great. You gonna to show me around?” “Sure, what do you wanna see?” “I don’t know, it’s your city. Show me whatever you want.” “Well, I have class in the mornings and one afternoon, but other than that I’ve kept my week free.” That was nice of her. An optimistic surge swept through my mind. We talked of back home (all of North America seems home from this far away), how my tour of India had been, what I had seen and done. I was hearing her every word but my mind was listening more to its own thoughts. I found her attractive, which was a relief because I wasn’t sure how I’d feel coming here. I had three days with her, not including this evening and the morning of the fourth day when I’d fly out. I had purposely taken the evening-arriving flight so we would have a chance to talk but wouldn’t have to talk too much; soon it would be time for sleep, a chance for me to synchronize my coming actions with my desires and intentions. It would be a problem if my initial reaction wasn’t a positive one. I remembered why I was here, why I had designed this detour on my way back home. Simply put I wanted to see her and see if we could make
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something happen. I wanted to sleep with her, to be with her. Of course I had no particular ending for the episode in mind; like everything else in my life it was left open-ended, to be dealt with when the need showed its ugly face. We sat down for dinner, pasta and Himachal red wine (from the wine shop on the ground floor of her building, she told me). Nothing special or elaborate, as I had expected from a student living on her own. More conversation of family and friends. I commented on her living space, making acute observations as I was prone to wherever I went. “That’s a nice relic of Toronto.” “What?” “The TTC Metropass on the wall!” There were Blue Jays tickets near the credit-card sized pass, an empty Molson bottle, and hanging above all a giant red-and-white maple leaf flag. I reckoned she’d dedicated this wall to Canadian memorabilia. I shifted my eyes clockwise. Photos of family: sister, brother, mother, father, grandparents and I didn’t know who else. Photos of friends: many I recognized but many I didn’t. There were a few, together with the rest but grouped separately, of her and a guy who, judging from the photos, seemed more than a friend. I took note but didn’t say anything. The look and contents of the room were typical of student life: messy (but not dirty), small old television with combination VCR/DVD player, a large clock on one wall (the plastic second hand of which ticked loudly), a laptop on a side table–hastily moved from the coffee table before my arrival (the AC adapter was orphaned there)–with several cables coming out of both sides and lid partly closed but not enough to turn off the screen.
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Day 1 I woke up before her and just lay in bed, praying for her to wake up so I could move about comfortably. Her class was at 9 AM. She told me to feel at home, make myself coffee, have cereal, etc. This sort of thing always makes me uncomfortable; the dynamic of occupying someone else’s space for a short while involves learning their rules and preferences, and, most of all, getting from them these minute but vital data in a congenial manner. Thankfully our exchange happened casually and quickly so I wasn’t made to look a fool to myself nodding over and over again to her instructions and repeating “OK” a hundred times. Somehow I passed the few hours with television internet and music, and when she returned we promptly went out to see the city. We walked along Chowringhee St., toward Victoria Memorial and around the huge park known as the Maidan. It was hot and sticky and too damn bright, but I didn’t let my physical discomfort show. I wasn’t at all concerned with where she was taking me. I hadn’t seen Calcutta before and didn’t really care to see it now. My concern was with her. (How was she looking at me? Talking to me? Was there a chance for anything to happen?) Sometimes I would fall behind her and watch her walk on without me. (She’d get lost in the crowd right then, and the tens of eyes following our ill-fitting foreign dress would be forced to choose which one to continue following; every time they chose her.) It lasted only a matter of seconds but the moment gave me a chance to feed the flame of longing I was nurturing inside. It wasn’t enough for me to have her. I wanted to have her in a certain way, which did justice to my ideas of romance. I wanted her in my way, with the reactions I wanted, the statements my ears wanted to hear, and the look my eyes wanted to see. She was being casual and friendly with me; I was making her laugh. She seemed to be having a good time. As for me, I was doing nothing
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but calculating inside my head, incessantly analyzing her every word and move and gauging her reactions to mine, whenever I could spot them. My throat was dry from the few words I spoke; all the words I spoke inside were just as demanding. After three or four hours we came back to her apartment, sun-burnt and sweating. She said she had gotten used to taking up to four showers daily, depending on the day and her need to be outside. Loathe as I am to showers, I would have paid someone to let me strip and stand under theirs for some precious minutes. “You go first.” “No no, go ahead.” “Are you sure?” “Yeah, go for it.” As I waited while she washed up, my mind jumped to some lusty thoughts. (Imagine her beauty in the flesh!) Brushing them aside, I went to the window and looked down. Park St. lay below, a few streets over; the window faced southwest, toward Victoria Memorial. I noticed more from a distance the giant monument than when I was inside it just a few hours ago. I saw the Howrah Bridge for the first time, the world’s busiest bridge, appropriately rising into the sky like the beast it is. Still, only my eyes were looking. My mind was thinking, imagining, wishing. I extricated my eyes from my body and rose above the Calcutta horizon and tried to picture myself as I looked from above, one of very few (I imagined) standing so high above the ground, over so many millions who had never even been so high up… Exalted human spirit! For sale! We are not all created equal! The human being is subject to the same forces of economics as land animals and products. We are for sale; we can be used, abused, returned, and expired. Servants can be bought on contract here in India. At
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first I was appalled and disgusted, but really, what is this different from a contract computer programmer or health professional? The only thing that gave cause for sadness and revolt in my mind was that the servant may be suffering the same mental torment of meniality that I’ve had to suffer thus far in all my money-earning occupations! She came out in a yellow towel wrapped around her, with a matching one covering her hair (long and black), and awoke me from my reverie.
“So what’re you doing now?” We sat down to dinner, same as last night. Tonight we were having take-out Indian she picked up from a restaurant downstairs while I was showering. “I don’t know right now, I’m still working on that.” I smirked to betray the comicality of my situation in my own eyes. Obviously she didn’t remember that I was freelancing for a men’s lifestyle magazine back home. I didn’t mind because I didn’t want to talk about myself or my work. “Any ideas?” “Not really, but I know I don’t want to do what everyone else does. Not because everyone is doing it or for the imaginary pleasure of rebellion. No, my simple hitch is that I don’t enjoy it. Working a steady routine, collecting credentials to collect money, setting dates with friends and lovers, etc. These things are not for me if I’ve learned anything about myself in my years on this earth so far.” The rest of the time I spoke very little, fearing very much that I’d said too much, hoping I hadn’t, and dreading the thought of having distanced her from me with my burst of selfrevelation.
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Day 2 Before leaving in the morning she told me about my options for the day. She would be in class till late afternoon. I could walk here and go there, take a bus to this place and then catch the Metro back. I told her not to worry and wandered out on my own. Many months wandering all over India made an afternoon to kill in Calcutta seem not so difficult. Eventually I chose to spend it in a bookstore where I drank three lattes over four hours and browsed through four magazines (reading articles and making notes along the way). Quite unexpectedly, in the evening she suggested we go out for dinner. We went to a nice restaurant somewhere on Park St. I was under-budget while traveling so had more money than I’d expected left over. I decided to splurge a bit and ordered a bottle of Australian Shiraz. It was an ordinary bottle by home standards but here it was considered above average (I can’t recall the name). I was hopeful that she would drink heartily, but really it was me who needed to drink, to loosen my nerves that were wound up tight in anticipation and so much thought. Drink in hand I wasn’t so worried. In a few minutes it would start working and conversation would lightly flow of itself. I looked around at the people, then at her. The restaurant was packed but still spacious. I tapped my fingers against the glass. When she was looking around I held my gaze upon her face just a bit longer and remembered what I wanted. She wore an Indian dress this evening, a blue salwar-kameez, but it was tight and fitted her nicely. There was little make-up on her face and her hair was tied up. You couldn’t tell she wasn’t Indian if she herself didn’t tell you. “How was your day? What did you end up doing?” “Let’s see, I walked around a bit, not too far though. Then I settled down at that bookstore nearby and read up on current events and drank lattes.”
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“Anything interesting in the news?” “Not really. The same old: Iraq, Bush, Obama, Hillary, etc. There was, though, a really good story on that NBC show To Catch a Predator.” I proceeded to tell her about the article, but as I did I was aware of how the atmosphere was slowly warming around us, just for us. A few times I felt my voice had gotten too loud and I had to lower it just a few decibels. She excused herself to the bathroom for a few minutes. When she returned: “You look beautiful tonight.” Upon my words she instantly blushed and, with both hands around her wine glass, looked sideways, holding a smile for a precious few moments. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Such a lovely response I hadn’t imagined when I had deliberated over what I would say when she came back! I was elated. The rest of the evening we talked non-stop about everything. I didn’t regret “splurging” on an ordinary bottle of Shiraz. When dinner was over she didn’t offer to pay, which drew my spirit even higher for it felt as if she were staking a small claim on me. We walked back to her apartment, close to each other but still apart. I imagined having the courage to put my arm around the small of her waist. Suddenly the thought of the guy in the pictures came to mind, and till I hit the sofa I was deterred. But, still feeling playfully intoxicated, I looked straight at him there on the wall and told him with my eyes, “Let happen what may, I’m going to try my luck. Stop me if you dare, you son-of-a-bitch!” (Immediately thereafter I felt bad because I didn’t even know the guy. I hoped he would see behind my words and not take offense!) When she came in with the coffee (I had politely asked her for coffee, knowing how her tea didn’t suit my taste), my elation rose again as, just like my heart desired, she sat next to me
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on the sofa and not on the chair I had sat in yesterday upon arriving. There were still a couple of feet between us, even after I sat sprawled with my arm across the sofa back. (Was she drunk, I wondered.) But not caring for the cause (only for the effect), I rested easy with a natural smile on my lips. “What’s that for?” she asked. “What?” “The smile on your face.” “Oh. I don’t know, I just feel nice.” “OK, good.” She smiled and I loved her for it. Two words that meant so much because they were accompanied by such a gorgeous smile. We drank coffee in silence. I made a couple of comments to the effect of “It’s excellent” (the coffee) and “I’m starting to like this city of yours.” I removed my arm, shifting my weight as I did to the right (she sat to my right). She didn’t budge. Her coffee was finished and she replaced the cup to the table. In a shock movement, which, now that I recall, I hadn’t premeditated until 2 seconds before, I put down my cup and went for her. Cup on the table, my body turned rightward. Right arm rose up to match the height of the left that was moving in a smooth arc toward her. She was leaning slightly forward, not resting against the sofa back. Both hands took her face simultaneously. Pushing her back gently, my body came in to support the effort. (How will she react?) I closed my eyes and planted my lips on hers. (They were there! She hadn’t evaded or pushed me away!) I kissed her softly and silently for I don’t know how long, but not long. What was I thinking? Why did I stop and not pursue further? I pushed off as gently as I’d come in and sat next to her, legs sprawled, head sideways on the upper curve of the sofa
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back. Moments later I corrected my posture and sat straight but still relaxed. I was stroking her hand which rested on her left knee. I didn’t want to say anything and she, thankfully, didn’t say anything either. Some minutes later we said goodnight and she went to her room and I got comfortable on the big sofa for the night. Day 3 “Good morning,” spoken with a smile that wasn’t there the previous morning, or the first night! “Good morning. Did you sleep well?” “Yeah, did you?” “Yeah, thanks. This sofa’s really comfortable.” Again I’d said too much. Maybe she’ll think I’m patronizing her, cunningly making her feel bad for making me sleep on a sofa. Fortunately I didn’t feel any bad effects arise from what I’d said. Today was a short day, she said, so I could amuse myself for a couple of hours and then we’d go out and explore some sights. When she returned from class we walked to the Esplanade and caught a local bus to Belur Math, home to the Ramakrishna Mission. She knew I read and admired Swami Vivekananda and wanted to show me his legacy as well as his resting place. I couldn’t break her heart and say I cared little to go there. I’d much rather just spend time with her, free of distractions. We went and I enjoyed myself. Still we were close but apart the entire time. Last night I fell asleep in foggy dreams of how today, the last day, would turn out. On the return bus trip to Park St. I confidently but hesitating inside put my arm around her. Once it was there I determined that, hell, it’s my last day with her. I have to show her now that I want her. We sat there and didn’t say much. I felt comfortable. I couldn’t tell how she felt.
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It was evening by the time we got back. I suggested we eat at her place and then go to a nice bar for drinks. (I knew nothing about the city but, as part of my design, I had read up on the nice bars in town and where they were located.) She resisted, saying she didn’t particularly feel like drinking tonight, but I convinced her by reminding her it was my last night in Calcutta and India, and also with her. I feel now that that was the pivotal point in our way of talking and interacting with each other. Just as the previous night she’d staked a minor claim on me by not offering to pay for dinner, tonight I felt I put a claim on her by convincing her to go with me. It was no minor claim in my eyes. “Don’t wear that. What’re you wearing?” “Why not? What’s wrong with it?” “I don’t know. It’s…can’t you wear a skirt?” For a moment she stood there, and then, letting her right shoulder fall, throwing her purse on the chair with the left arm, and the same beautiful smile on her face as this morning, she quietly went back inside to change. I was standing in front of the sofa and simply fell back from happiness. (What’s the meaning of this? This is more incredible than I had even imagined!) Because the truth is that, however much I had imagined, it had never been with great clarity. I only knew the outline of the shape I desired, never its form texture or substance. So to see it before my eyes, the real thing to my mental photo negative, was almost too much for the heart to take! After about twenty minutes she emerged from her room, which she hadn’t entirely closed the door to but only pushed lightly so it closed just over half way. (Maybe she was silently inviting me in to help her decide what to wear!) I was still sitting on the sofa with my mind
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racing excitedly all over the world. She had decided on a brown skirt, fitting around her hips and down well past her knees. Partnering with it was a simple white button-up blouse. “How’s this?” I waited a few moments, still sitting, then got up and walked over to where she stood. I looked at her and didn’t speak. She looked at me questioningly. I’ll always remember that look so clearly! On seeing it I wanted to fall back down on the sofa, but I had sense enough to remember it was no longer behind me! (What could that look mean? She’s looking to me and just me for validation!) Standing close to her a while longer, I walked over, picked up her purse from the chair, brought it over and gave it to her, and, placing my arm around her back, silently led her out the door. We went to a trendy bar at a popular hotel on Park St. There was a crowd on the Thursday evening and a live band was playing covers of popular American pop songs. We started at the bar, she with a house martini and a Grey Goose and tonic for me. I looked at her differently now, and she looked at me not the same either. My eyes searched in her while hers drew everywhere but to meet mine. “Hi,” I said smilingly. “Hi.” (Oh, I could die for this woman! That voice! That look in her eyes!) “What’s the matter?” “Nothing.” Not wishing to probe further verbally, I pressed on her hand which was holding the base of her martini glass on the bar. I no longer wondered whether she would withdraw it from me. I pressed harder than I had with her before. I felt she was mine now. I didn’t like the way we were sitting–it was keeping me from getting closer to her. I spotted an empty booth in the corner
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intended for a large group and, without asking whether it’s available, we made our way over and sat at the deep end of the circular bay. Now I got close to her like I wanted to. “Come here.” She came closer to me. We sat like that for the rest of the night, my arm around her, she close to me. Our bodies touched in so many places, our legs intertwined in some moments, my arm sometimes over her shoulders, sometimes around her waist. I didn’t speak much because my mind was speaking to me, questioning me where I intended to take this night and how. She didn’t say much either. I was expecting that maybe she’ll ask what we’re doing, where we go from here, and so on. She was surprisingly quiet–even a bit tired it seemed to me. I didn’t let that ruin my high though, and held her even closer and tighter. After a very long silence I spoke. “I’m going tomorrow.” “I know.” Then she asked: “Do you want me to take you to the airport in the morning?” “Do you want to?” “Yeah.” I led her back to the apartment. The door was unlocked by my right hand and opened with her back as I pushed against her while kissing her passionately and forcefully. She was clearly drunk but not to the point of being unaware. Closing the door now with my left hand, I pushed her to the wall adjacent to the bedroom and kissed her some more. I forced my hand between the wall and her hips and pulled up her skirt; I reached up and caressed her thighs and between them. My chest hugged her tightly and I could feel her breasts heaving. Her hands were locked around my neck as she moaned gently between heavy breaths. Soon we made it to the room and to the bed where I lay on top of her. I undressed her and she undressed me, as
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much as she could anyway (she got stuck on the belt where I had to help her). And then we stopped. “What’s the matter?” She didn’t speak but continued kissing me, now on my lips, now all over my face in brief quick spurts, as if trying to tell me something she couldn’t communicate in words. “What’s the matter?” I stopped her gently and asked her again. “I don’t want you to make love to me.” “Why not?” Again, no response. She resumed kissing me fervently and held me tight. I decided then I wouldn’t make love to her. For the rest of the night I held her close and she latched tightly to my chest, and sooner or later we fell asleep. Day 4 I woke up with a start. My flight was at 11:30 AM and the red LEDs on the bedside radio alarm clock read 7:32–plenty of time still. She was already up; I couldn’t see her but heard sounds from the bathroom. I had had a terrible dream and felt deeply perplexed why it had chosen to disturb me now. I dreamt that I had spent the night with a past love. The left side of her face was burnt and swollen. She said her 18-year old cousin had beaten her with a bat, for a ridiculous reason I didn’t remember now. The dream abruptly vanished for a little while as I dreamt of something/someone else, but when I came back she was lying on the couch in white underwear (tank top and boy shorts) ready to receive me. I uttered “I love you” and that threw her off, as well as the moment. She left and I regretted what I had said.
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I sat up in bed and thought… Like bloodstreams carry life, so streams in the mind carry images and memories, and streams in the heart carry feeling. One such stream has overflowed as an old lost love rises to the surface and demands something from me. Images, memories, and feelings flood consciousness and if I don’t acknowledge them I’ll certainly drown in their current. She’s long gone from my world, moved on but still where she always was. I, the itinerant traveler, explore the far corners of the world but still can’t relinquish her from my thoughts, dreams, and my life. She fascinated me the way she crossed her legs, right leg crossing over the left well above the knee. It was elegant. Her back was straight, chest was out; her hair covered her back, sometimes curly sometimes straight. Our romance had been as powerful as our demise… My Calcutta girl came into the room, freshly bathed. I tried to smile at her but it was obvious something wasn’t right. Undoubtedly she thought it had to do with our night last night. The third and biggest bomb had dropped. “You should get ready.” “Yeah, I will.” I spoke tiredly, still shaken from my dream. I managed to get up and shower and get my few things together. We left the apartment quietly together, hailed a taxi and arrived at the airport at 9:30. “Thanks for having me” I said. We were both slightly uncomfortable and it was obvious to us both. “You’re welcome.” “Are you going home anytime soon?”
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“I’m not sure.” This was going nowhere. I gave her a hug, an artificial kiss, and turned around and started walking away. I was agitated with myself (Why this? Why now?). The mind is impertinent and needs be punished. Thousands of miles and many borders and languages between us and still it thinks of you! That ice cream we never shared but it wishes we had; that fight we had that seemed first serious then trivial, and now seems simply classic; that moment after we looked into the other’s eyes and saw not only resentment we wouldn’t speak but also the strength of commitment that, we realized not much later, was showing its age. Such impertinence to dwell entirely in memory, to forget the present and breathe the stale air of the past made artificially fresh from emotion. Dumb courage that longs for what’s long gone, let go of not without a head-turned-sideways sigh of relief; the fall cushioned by anticipation of all that’s better still to come which never came… Contemplating thus I had made it pretty far; so consumed was I in this spell of the past that I didn’t care to turn around to see if she (the one I visited) was still there. Instead, I rushed to the nearest payphone and called the one I had dreamt of. (It had been years but I still remembered her number, a rhythmic sequence of digits with a lot of 8s. It hadn’t changed.) She picked up. “Hi, it’s me.” It’s all I could think of to say. “Hi.” “How are you?” “I’m good, how are you?” “Listen, I have something to ask you.”
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“What?” I had wanted to say: “I think of you often. When loneliness bites I think of you; when I think of you loneliness bites. I met others but none like you. You were ordinary when I met you, but since the day I left you you’ve become so special. “I wonder if I can get you back, if you’ll want it, if you’ll allow it. If it happens I question how I’ll feel differently this time, how you’ll feel. Does anything ever change, will anything change between us?” Instead I minced my words and, not letting hesitation spoil my voice, said: “Will you marry me?” I didn’t know if she was already married, divorced, alive or dead. I was somewhere between knowing too well and pretending not to know what I was doing at that moment; between ignoring and holding back all reason in short lapses. I heard the words I had spoken echo back in my ears. Silence prevailed, I can’t say how long, and then the response I wouldn’t have expected in seven lifetimes (let alone this one).
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Section 2–Incidents
I must tell you that this book is an entirely selfish venture on my, the nameless narrator's, part. I am out not just to tell my tale but to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of making you understand me. I cannot compartmentalize my mind any more than it already is. Because of my thinking nature I'm already made to think about the everyday mundane eating drinking sleeping waking sitting lying… It would be too much to break myself even further to try to be neat and polished to present myself to you. I write in paradoxes and parentheses; I speak on impulse and in vulgar form. Some people are able to make clean divisions between separate aspects of their lives: career, friends, family, relationships, inner life; but for me it's almost all the same–partly because of how life's turned out (some aspects practically non-existent while others overbearingly present) but mainly because it's just who I am and how I operate within. Maybe, though, I wasn’t born like this. I acquired prejudices and perversities over time, and now they define what I observe to be my style. To comprehend my story you simply must indulge me and think at all times of me– concern yourself with my state of mind and thoughts only; wonder on my mental climate as you envision me writing. The way I prefer to look at it is as an open invitation to you, my dear reader, to the place where life lives–inside my head. I have chosen to reveal private thoughts and moments, and to lay bare some closely held images and dreams that could bring me scorn and ridicule; but unless my legs shake and give in or my feet betray me, I intend to start this journey now as, quite fittingly, another one has come to its end.
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About her She walks on air, light as a breeze. She sleeps on water, free as a drop. Skin like rose, love like color unfortunate blind will never see, She walks through air with wind behind her back pushing a little too hard. Beauty is the raft of her journey, navigating troubled waters in solo fashion. In empty sky she feels lonely, not knowing the gods cradle her from all sides in cotton cushion. She bathes in the stream, cold cleansing bare supple skin. She reads in the grass, rare blade peering out from uniform bed. I abduct her for life, to uncover her every fold and curve and tint.
That was a different time, a different space, an entirely different atmosphere when I knew her. When I was getting to know her the world was different than it is today. It’s an observation only hindsight affords, thereby rendering itself useless because it doesn’t have the power to change anything at all… The news, the weather, the color of the sky were all different than they are today. (Even where I live isn’t the same as that time.) They’re different each and every day, but because that was the day I knew you, it was a special day, and so everything about it takes on deeper meaning. I picture myself in that different space, and I see myself partly missing–the missing part being that which I’ve put on since then. I picture that incomplete self from the past and question whether I was happier that way or am I better off now. It’s a rhetorical, timeless, and meaningless question, because I’ll ask myself the same thing tomorrow. But it’s just so interesting I can’t ignore it. My head is like a jar without a lid, with a part of my brain I imagine missing because of knowledge I have now that didn’t exist then.
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…I knew her so long ago that to tell you about her all I have are fragments of moments we shared and insights I derived from those experiences. They'll come to me now that she's on my mind. Meanwhile, the place to start is by telling you what she was not. She wasn't anything she didn't appear to be; she looked like what she was and didn't look like anything she wasn't. What I mean is that most people have at least a couple surprises stored in the space between what they appear to be and what they really are. With her it wasn't like that. She was smart and she looked it; she was friendly and giving; she was a daddy's girl and she looked that too (don't ask how because I can't say). Never before had I met someone so twodimensional yet still so beautiful. At first I thought what a boring way to live, in the open like she does, with nothing hidden or mysterious about her. Over time, however, that thought gave way to an admiration and even a slight jealousy for her simple and clean mode of living. She was as uncomplicated as humans get. She didn't appear bitchy because she wasn't. She wasn't mean or conceited or any of that. Sure, her concerns seemed petty to me, but time has taught me it's my concerns that are uncommonly grave. To be with her was to be less serious for a while. I won't lie and say all my worries vanished when I was with her; that would mean my nature changed–a romantic notion, that one can change another's character.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–22
Space and time Suddenly, in a jerk movement of the heart, I remember how I felt before we parted (so distant from her), and incidents occur to memory to fill the space for facts and conjectures. I found an old note that I wrote when I was with her… She makes me wait. It’s one of the things I most dislike about her. I feel that I’ve already spent a lifetime in just waiting, for her, for everyone else. Either the world’s never on time or my clock is perpetually fast. One afternoon I wait for her, stuck outside in high noon, my neck burnt and bowing under the weight of the sun, and each of my senses drowning in its own particular desire: eyes want polarized shade, ears want rustling leaves of a shady tree, skin wants cool breeze, mouth wants crisp cold water, and standing apart, my nose longs for her fragrance she throws so softly. I wait and I age, and I think the following thought: time, in the form of age, serves to teach us the life lesson of impermanence. Today’s blockbusters, tomorrow’s fads, yesterday’s gossip–as they accumulate over time I see them not petrify into valuable gold–something fixed– but wither and die like autumn leaves each year. The only permanence is impermanence, the only rule without exception that there are always exceptions. …Now that I'm older, I see how superficial and academic my realization was at that time. I'm uncomfortable repeating it because I see myself like a little kid who's speaking words too big for his time, mindlessly reiterating something he read in a book or heard an older person say. I didn't feel that impermanence in my heart and mind; so many things–everything about us–felt so permanent; so much was taken for granted because of that false faith… Now I can add to that and say that, despite the impermanence, man, in all his flux and indecisive flurry, seems to
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–23
possess some small kernel deep within that I feel with my gut doesn’t die or even permeate. Far beneath this chaos of motion sits something very still, unmoving and watching, silently… Then another thought comes to mind: “Space serves an interesting and subtle purpose in relation to time,” I said to her one time. “What’s that?” “I just thought that as you travel and cover physical distance you notice that some places you’re visiting exist in a different time than what you’re used to. You travel to third-world Africa and Asia and there, right before your eyes, life is going on as it did fifty or even a hundred years ago in the developed world. In that sense space seems to me to exist as a carriage in time.” After a few seconds’ pause I add, “It is, I consider, the poet’s version of Einstein’s great discovery that space and time are indeed one.” She is silent. I haven’t reached her, nor will I. It’s not that she’s not smart; she always does better academically than me, always has a higher GPA. The thing is that her mind just doesn’t have the bend for such idle contemplations as I seem to specialize in. She is, in my honest and humble opinion, built for this world, to do the things and think the thoughts that let this earth breathe another day and sleep another night. I walk the streets and watch the world at work and I stand apart from the action and I think: How much longer can it continue like this, how much longer will the earth sustain us in this way? (How long till I can keep buying paper at the office store, vegetables at the grocery store, gas at the pump…how long before everything runs out?) While I question and search for answers I'm sure I won’t find, she’s across a big ditch from me (where all the action is), working the very world in which I live and question.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–24
Moments later I feel her arm around my neck and her chin on my shoulder. She’s softly stroking my ear. “That’s a really great thought sweetheart. Keep writing.” …Maybe I was unfair and overly presumptuous, I wonder sometimes now. Maybe a long time ago I decided from instinct that she’ll never comprehend me, and I perpetuated that feeling by acknowledging those observations I found in its favor and casually blind-sighting all others. Moments of revelation betray a sense that others are as full of questions as I am. But the relief from that is as fleeting as the moment that brings it. Furthermore, after the moment is over I feel disconcerted and even more curious, questioning that if they're really like I am, why is there distance between our hearts? Why was there distance between her heart and mine if she's the same as me?
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–25
My friend I knew of distant family in Delhi I could have stayed with but I didn’t notify anyone that I was coming, and strictly instructed my parents against doing so either. I didn’t want to get bogged down in making the rounds of a dozen houses to sit there for chai and snacks and make small talk. The questions were always the same: what do you do (are you an engineer doctor lawyer; do you have an MBA), how’s family, have you thought about marriage, etc. They would always end by saying you should visit again, and/or you should come stay with us for a few days. These are people I would have been seeing after many years, with no contact whatsoever in between. To hear that they would like me to stay with them for a few days was more alienating than inviting, because I could hardly be sure of their sincerity in saying so. The last time I hung out with otherworldly family was when a relative from my dad’s side came to the US for his Master’s and I was charged with showing him around and keeping him company until my dad and his parents convened over the phone and decided he could make it on his own. He was 24 years old then. I had never met him before and knew nothing about him. From listening to him talk, though, I learned how young Indian adults conceived cool talk and how differently they used certain dirty words. Among smaller expressions like “Coolio!” and “Neato!” the highlights for me were gangbang (referring to a group of guys beating up one) and foursome (double-date). One lazy snowed-out afternoon we went out driving and he told me about a college friend of his who had a foursome with his girlfriend and another couple and then got gangbanged by his girlfriend’s brother. While I couldn’t help bursting out laughing, I didn’t bother correcting his notions because I decided that if I were in his place and someone told me, I would be made to feel incredibly self-conscious, and I didn’t want to do that to him. I let him drive in an empty
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–26
mall parking lot where he could make the car skid and slide. Every time he did that he’d say “Neato!” I pictured him saying something like “Hey guys, did you see that gangbang outside?” to his new friends in college. I had to worry how he would fare here. But, like most people do, he learned what to say and what not to fairly quickly. We’re no longer in touch but last I heard he was dating another student from his program, a nice American girl from Virginia.
"How do I explain to your mother what it is I'm writing?" I stayed with a friend and his family in Delhi, and spent a continuous ten days with them at one point. (I would leave and return several times throughout my travels.) His folks were two of the nicest people I ever met. They catered to me like a guest but gave of their love like I was family. Next to my friend the person I talked to most was his mother. "Did she ask you?" My friend looked up from the ledger he had been staring at for at least ten minutes. "It's what I'm doing most of the time when she sees me, so naturally she's curious about it." "Just tell her you're writing a diary, or tell her you're writing down all the places you've visited. Just make up something simple. She doesn't know what a novel or short story are." "You don't even want me to try to explain? She's never seen or read a novel in her life? Come on, that's a bit hard to believe." A simple woman, my friend's mother, God bless her soul. She couldn't read write or speak English and she wasn't educated beyond the 10th grade (by her account), the 6th (according to her husband), and the 4th (per my friend her son). But a more talkative woman I have yet to meet. She was very energetic in her daily activities. Friendly with everyone, from
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–27
the neighbor to the rickshaw driver (a different one every morning because there were so many of them waiting around for business just ten steps from their back door), she yelled at them loud and stern, as if they were her children or servants, when they charged too much (which was always) to take her where she was going. Watching her like this every day, the distance between us was all the more striking, considering I was living with them and spending so much time with her. And it was there I thought because she didn't know what I was writing all the time. I had to try to explain it to her. "Aunty it's a book of stories." It wasn't really anything when I was talking to her about it. I was only making notes of observations and thoughts as I traveled. "Stories about what?" "About people I meet or things I see, or just ideas that come to me out of nowhere." She didn't say anything so I sensed she didn't quite understand but was being polite by not questioning me. I asked her, "Have you ever read any novels or books of stories?" "You mean like Ramayana and Upanishads? Pitaji (dad) used to read from them to us when we were little. Then after I got married my saas (mother-in-law) sat all her bahus (daughters-in-law) down with her every morning to pray to Sri Rama and Sri Krishna. We would each take turns reading from the Ramayana and the Geeta. Other than that I remember I read some Tagore poems in school." I didn't know which authors or titles I could relate to her with. My reading circle was an age and a world apart from hers. I remembered a book I had finished a few days ago, Srikanta, by an early 20th century Bengali writer. "Do you know Saratchandra Chattopadhyaya Aunty?" "No, who's he?"
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–28
"He wrote Devdas and Parineeta. Did you read those? They must have been popular in your time." "No. I saw the movies. The original Devdas with Dilip Kumar and the new one with Shah Rukh Khan. Their saris were so beautiful, don't you think?" An unfruitful exchange and a failed effort. How could I reach this woman? I suppose I hadn't tried all that hard but I wasn't motivated to try further. With a smile I agreed with her that the saris were beautiful and resumed sitting in silence.
My friend is a very intelligent guy, even has an MBA. But in the end he didn’t want an office job. His parents implored him to find a nice job and go abroad, but he insisted that he was happy in India and wanted to manage his own business. So, with their financial backing, he set up a store that he runs quite successfully on his own. He says he would like to travel abroad, to see Niagara Falls and the Pyramids, but for living he never considered anywhere but India. He lives the same routine day in and day out. He has six distractions (we counted together) that he requires to feel entertained and content with his daily ritual: girls, whiskey, cell phone, video games, laptop, and car. From what I saw of him, he can stay fulfilled in the life he currently leads, every day same as the one before, till eternity as long as he has these points of contentment within easy reach. What bothered me was how to relate to him, because I feel so much different. I was starting to lose my mind because I had been in the city for over a week now. I was dying to get out and experience the different just because it's different. How do I share this feeling with him, I thought, when he simply cannot learn what it feels like? It's not something you can grasp with your mind but rather recognize only because you've felt it before yourself, and on that basis you
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–29
empathize with another. In that communion between two hearts one finds relief and hope; in company the heart takes courage. He read my notebook even if I didn't want him to. I didn't care, it was amusing for me, but the point is he didn't care to ask. He just grabbed it when I wasn't actively writing in it (including when it was sitting in front of me and I had just lifted my pen for a few moments to think over something). "Why do you write like that?" he asked me. We were sharing murg makhni (butter chicken) with naan at a dhaaba (local restaurant) near their house. We started talking about all sorts of things and somehow ended up at my writing. "Like what?" "You know, so vague and abstract. You don't name places or people, and you don't describe settings." I scooped a generous amount of gravy into the bite of naan in my right hand and took a large bite out of the chicken breast with my left. "I don't have the patience in me for details of the novelistic sort; I wonder whether I'm not really just a poet forcibly donning the novelist's garb. "Plus," after a while I said, "are names really necessary? Maybe they help you construct a real person in your mind to relate to. But what I'm talking about doesn't require it, so why not be direct? If I gave a name you'd have feelings toward a particular character. I'm telling you about me, about yourself. We don't need names for that." I continued, "And if it's a situation you and I couldn't be in, it's the situation that's more telling than the character, right? So who needs names?" I spoke proudly, like expounding from long-restrained genius.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–30
I spoke again, not wishing to waste this opportunity for selfrevelation/justification/vindication: "I like to paint abstract portraits or vignettes–nice word huh? I learned it the other day–with these minor pieces I write. I think I make them specific enough to understand, but they're open to your interpretation and free for you to apply to characters of your real life. I don't want to create a complete environment with detailed setting, named characters, etc. I'll give you instead a transparent situation for you to lay over any setting you like, that holds meaning for you." As I talked I pictured the profile of a person behind the words of Anna Karenina. Levin, or Anna, or Oblonsky even. The character didn’t have a face; he was just an outline. Behind the transparent, bordered outline I pictured a lot of other words extending into the page, like a stock ticker; words of varying shades, fonts, and sizes… These words create a negative image of a person, so that he’s not rising toward me but falling away from me. Over his image are the words of the text. Those words that are falling into the page give him depth, those are the ideas the author is trying to convey. But they (the ideas) can’t be written directly. They have to be placed there by you and me, the reader, inspired in our conscience by the text we read. Someone else’s image will differ from mine, but not by much. Their choice of words might vary…shading, size–all these things are variable. But from a distance, each person’s picture of the character should resemble every other’s (unless someone has a really far out interpretation of what the author is trying to say)… "I've noticed that I gloss over details of setting when I read," I spoke voluntarily once again. "The month of year, the description of the house, the furniture and all that, I read them but they get boring easily and I lose interest if they're too long. "I want to write at the speed of thought, the speed of action. You understand?"
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–31
"How do you know others read like you do and don't like those details?" He hadn’t answered my question but instead asked his own. "I don't, that's why I don't do away with them entirely. Plus I wonder whether reading them even without full interest sets up the atmosphere in the reader’s mind for the action and interaction that's the meat of the story." I picked up where I left off with my original point about names, "Sometimes I do give them names." Then suddenly it dawned on me. "Are you just offended because I didn't give you one?" Naturally he didn't respond, and slid the basket of naan across the table back toward me.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–32
Remembrances I walked into the bicycle shop with a strong erection. We were wasting time on a typical summer afternoon window shopping and had gotten separated. I was looking for her but, owing to embarrassment, I pretended to need a suspension fork and indulged the sales guy to the point of negotiating a price. …She must have been wearing something really sexy (I remember it was very hot, so yeah…something sexy), and we must have wandered somehow into a mischievous conversation, something about going back to my place or finding a cozy change room… She was across the street. When I found her I told her what happened and the state I was in. She burst out laughing, drawing attention from the few people around. Again feeling embarrassed, I pinched her in the small of her back so she tried to evade me through peals of laughter. In this condition I grabbed her hand and we ran out of the store, both of us now laughing joyfully.
Some remembrances become remembrances of their own. Sometimes when I think of you, I remember other times when you were with me in this same way. The impact of those recollections ran so deep that they left their own unique impression behind. I recall where I was sitting or what I was doing when I thought of you then. One such occasion I was hiking up a hill just outside Dalhousie, alone as always, through a beautiful thick fog. I felt in my feet the inappropriateness of the running shoes I was wearing. I stopped frequently to take pictures though I couldn’t see far. Two-thirds of the way up was a village, where I stopped quickly to learn the name of the place from a man who was eyeing me suspiciously but turned out to be friendly once I said Namaste. I was headed down the wrong
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–33
path, into the village, but he corrected me and pointed the way further up. Between two and three hours after starting I arrived at the top, where I could go no further. It was then that you came to me. You swooped down on me without warning. I tried but couldn’t identify what motivated your attack. You slowed me down with the stream of dead-end memories you brought rushing; my feet slowed and I even tripped because you’d stolen my attention. I couldn’t keep walking so I submitted to sitting on a section of rock free of green growing on it. You were still with me and weren’t letting go. I pulled myself far away enough to make note of the ferocity of your attack. It was fervor unknown to me till now. I watched a bird and a butterfly but they soon flew away. I flicked crawlers off my arms and legs, watchful of your presence and lost in the question of why it was there with me on such a pleasant afternoon. Did you want to see me sad? I was made sad and with sad eyes I saw the green earth and the blue sky and the brown and white rock. I looked to them to release me, to raise me with their beauty from the earthly trap of memory and sentiment, but they were powerless against you… She waited for me under our tree. Children played soccer nearby, close enough you could hear them screaming and cheering. It wasn't always our tree; it didn't organically, the way our story naturally unfolded, become our tree. On the contrary I had to artificially declare it that. We met in school, when I befriended a member of her group of friends. I met her indirectly but it didn't take me long to single her out as the one I wanted. Whether she wanted me was a secondary consideration I could easily gloss over owing to idyllic youth. In the chapter of infatuation she was constantly on my mind, first thing upon waking and the last thought before sleeping each night. One afternoon after returning from school I was, as usual, absorbed
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–34
in her thoughts when, looking out the window from my desk as I thoughtlessly chatted with someone on the computer, I spotted the one tree in the neighborhood park (there were other trees but this one stood alone). Close to it were a swing-set and a sandlot. I was young like I said, and given to romantic rumination as far back as memory goes. This was the stage when we hadn't spoken much to one another. We would speak to friends and to each other when we were around friends, but hardly alone. On its own the thought suddenly arose that she should call me, that when she does I should speak sweetly to her and flirt like I had seen in movies. Having had a successful conversation, the detailed contents of which I didn't want to tire my mind laboring over, I should invite her for a brief post-dinner rendezvous. It wasn't a question where to invite her because the tree had spawned this whole scenario in my mind to begin with. Once there, the thought chain directed, we would continue conversing and I might even touch her, even dare to kiss her. The phone-call, the rendezvous, the dreamy talk touch kiss; none of them happened… How could they? She lived at home with her parents, far from college, so having her over postdinner was out of the question… Still we came together, through more practical and realistic events. One afternoon when I was telling her this pre-us story, I decided there and then that, hell, if reality didn't like my dream, I could at least retroactively give it some credence, some life. From that point on we started calling it our tree. …With the memory comes a synaptic encapsulation of the entire length of time between then and now, which evokes not thought but emotion. It leaves me feeling disturbed from an equilibrium that’s actually always momentary; questioning past acts and words spoken, and above all, aflame with the question that has no answer: Why did it happen this way…
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–35
Resigned to the futility of my few efforts I started walking back down the hill through the untiring fog. I felt you in my calves, tense as they were trying to maintain grip on slippery slope. In an hour I descended, still carrying both our weights on tired legs with tired mind. The evening did away with the sun and I felt well to be sitting. Time had done away with you for now, and I rested with a grateful mind but a heart that was still heavy. Romance is synonymous with sorrow, with sacrifice, with solemn and somber. Romance is not love–weightless and without a past present or future. Romance is as entwined with time as any other long-standing association…as life is with breath. I realize perhaps I have never loved but simply romanced, grateful (really) for the opportunity, but not fully understanding the rules of the game until it’s too late and it’s over and I’ve somehow lost. Each romance was a new game with its own variations on the same basic rules, and each time I learned faster but not fast enough to outpace the romance of sorrow (so that each time, whether another heart broke or not because of me, mine always did). I don’t blame myself or anyone else. These episodes have brought gravity and given consequence to the romance of my life.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–36
Dancing On the small town’s only bar’s floor you dance, Made up in black and Paris red, dressed in a revealing red top over a black skirt. I see you move with no appendages; No bungees, no parachute, no supercharged engine vibrating behind your seat, telling you how to feel. You move and you swim, and the expressions on your face make this a venture worthwhile. The way your eyes move, tracing all corners of the compass; Then in a moment of rapture you look straight at me, or him, or any one of us, setting heart after heart on fire. Your eyes move. The way you look to both sides while I adore your lips from afar… The tongue peeks through, moistening their bumpy surface. (You can taste the lipstick but we have no idea.) In that moment, anything you do with your eyes drives men crazy. Your arms are rising and falling like ocean waves, from shoulder to fingertip, in harmony with the music. I have to distract myself from your inviting countenance to notice your legs automatically walking without going anywhere. Men buy you drinks, sometimes you take, other times you refuse. Your friends bittersweetly guard your honor as you lose yourself to the sound and the fury; They watch you just as the men do, only with envy in place of desire. You evoke high images and dramas in the loins on men. They cannot picture that familiar torn t-shirt you’ll change into when you arrive home just before you slip into bed.
We were lying in bed at my place. It was Saturday morning; she had slept over after going dancing with her girlfriends the previous night. She was wearing an ivory satin teddy I bought her for Valentine's Day. I kept sliding it off her shoulder and kissing it while she kept replacing it. "I don't want you to go dancing with your friends anymore." "Excuse me?" "You heard me."
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–37
"Why not?" "Because you're my woman now. I can't have other men looking at you and touching you. From now on you're going to only go three places: home, school, and my place… And I know you don’t drink but I don’t want you to suddenly start either.” She looked at me with that look of expectation, waiting for me to continue. "You're going to stop talking to all your guy friends or I'll have to break their legs." "What about all your girl friends, are you going to stop talking to them?" "No, that's different. I'm a guy, I can do whatever I want." "Oh yeah? Any other orders for me then?" I thought for a while, feigning seriousness as well as I could. "No, that's it for now. But you could go make me a coffee." She got on top of me and started hitting me with the pillow, laughing playfully like she did as she hit me. I tried to seize and bring her down but it was more fun being assaulted like this… From the moments between when the pillow was smashing my eyes, I remember looking at her intently… The left strap (the one I was playing with earlier) kept sliding off as she was leaned over me. Her body was beautiful, her face was beautiful; her laugh and her voice were absolutely beautiful. Eventually I pulled her down and, with a kiss to her mouth and running my hands through the teddy all over her body, got out of bed to make us some coffee. …In that moment I remember feeling safe about her, secure that she was mine despite everything that may happen. Men desired her, I knew that, but she desired me, and I desired her. Whatever happened out there in the world–at the bars and clubs, on the street and with friends– was meaningless. What really mattered was that I was the only one who got to see her in the tshirt and shorts she borrowed from my closet.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–38
Sikkim In the beginning, after we had just met, she would spontaneously ask me random questions about how much I loved her. I found them annoying but somewhat entertaining also. They weren't so much meaningless as benign. For example, one day while we were walking around the mall, she asked me: "Would you still love me if I was fat?" Obviously the question took me by surprise, because we hadn't just been talking about a fat person, or seen a fat person and acknowledged to each other with our eyes that look, there goes a fat person. Nothing of the sort had happened, so I was confused. I kept walking but I turned to face her as I spoke. "What? What kind of question is that?" "Just answer me." "Yeah, I'd still love you, but I'd probably tell you that you're getting fat and suggest you exercise." She instantly fired back, "Well, I'd love you no matter what, whether you were fat or poor or anything else." I still didn't know what kind of conversation this was or was becoming, but I knew that I didn't want to get deeper into it by asking her, so I just went along for fun. I asked her: "Would you forgive me if I cheated on you?" "Would you forgive me?" She didn’t waste a second to respond. "Probably not. I can't think of why you would want to cheat on me." "Well there you go, I wouldn't forgive you either."
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–39
"But you just said you would love me if I was fat, isn't that in a way forgiving me for neglecting my body? Why wouldn't you forgive me for cheating on you, just once?" "They're not the same." "Sure they are. In principle, they're the same. It's about forgiveness." It was clear I wouldn't win this one, and I wasn't trying to. I was just entrapping her in her own friendly questions–not to be malicious but just for the sake of it–just because I could. One evening I became random in much the same way with my friend (except I had a point to my randomness). We were drinking beer with parkoras and samosas (fried snacks) on the roof of the house. Aunty had a weekly religious engagement to attend so we had to feed ourselves. The electricity was out for over an hour and we were perspiring in the volume of raindrops. The sun was slowly going down so soon it would cool down to a comfortable hot. Many families across the street were on their roofs as well, mostly kids playing and being loud. Kites flew high in the clear sky, as far as the eye could see. The beer wasn't cold. “Your neighbor’s pretty cute.” I said. On the roof across the street five kids were running in circles playing some sort of game. The oldest of them was a girl of about 20. She was wearing a salwar-kameez without the dupatta. The fact that she was running around with little kids and having a good time was something in itself, I thought. “Forget it, she’s too young for you.” “I know, I’m just saying, that’s all.” She had long hair and a great figure, thin and curvy. “I hear they’re trying to get her married off.” “That’s too bad. Listen, what would you do if you were with a really sexy girl and she just passed out on you, while you're alone with her?” Before he spoke about her marriage the question was already brewing in my head.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–40
"What?" "Hypothetically speaking, what would you do?" “Try to revive her, I guess” he said looking back straight ahead and taking a big sip. “Take her to a doctor or something.” "That's it? Nothing else?" He paused to think then said, "You mean would I touch her or take advantage of the situation sexually?" "Yeah." "No I wouldn't." "Why not? I mean what's your reason why?" "I just wouldn't. There is no reason. Why would I?" I was about to invoke the neighbor again but she had since left the roof and the smaller kids playing by themselves. "Well, to a lesser extent, because of your inborn male desire, and to a greater extent, because of such easy access to a rare and valuable and desirable commodity." "You seem to be justifying why you would do it." "No, I wouldn't do it either. In Gangtok I met a guy who leads treks to Kanchenjunga from Yuksom every season. He's been doing it for over 15 years so he has many stories. One night I was sitting with him and a couple of other guys and we got talking about women. He related an incident he had a couple of years ago with a trekker from Switzerland. She came in the off-season (early September) and wanted to trek to Goecha La to see Kanchenjunga. There wasn't anyone else around but she was willing to pay the entire fare by herself. It was him and her and two porters carrying their food and tents. She was slightly older, he said, and wanted a few more comforts along than most tourists demand. She wasn't an experienced trekker, and one
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–41
afternoon she passed out for a little while; he, being drunk as we talked, told me how he managed the situation, and how he felt as it happened. Obviously he didn't do anything, but I was really interested in what morality or righteousness keeps a man straight in vulnerable moments like that. Based on what he told me that night (which wasn't elaborate or very introspective), I thought about how he might have felt or thought, about how I would feel in a situation like that. Remember I said I like to write at the speed of thought? This is what I meant: no extraneous details to create an elaborate setting. Instead, a barebones framework of essential facts, with the focus being on thoughts and action."
She fell over. We were trekking in the mountains and she just fell over. We weren't even at 4000m. Thankfully she fell back and on me, not forward into the rock. We were alone and not a soul could be heard, nor had we seen anyone in the first two days of our trek. I didn't know what to do. I wasn't panicked because I checked her pulse and she was breathing normally. It was high summer (so it wasn't the cold that did it). I was wearing cotton shirt and shorts with sandals. She was dressed like an L.A. fitness girl. I was bent over her, her head on my knee. Her body was amazingly sexy. I couldn't look up from her legs, which were uncovered to the very first curve of her glutes. When I did look up I saw how full and firm her breasts were. (There are two styles girls dress in that really get to me: the going-to-the-gym look, and the fitted button-down shirt with tight black pants look.) Long slender neck, hair pulled so tight as if to punish it; naturally lust became me. I remained frozen as I was, not moving hands legs or body any closer to her form. It was a personal and moral dilemma. I wondered what was stopping me. I felt shame and a sublime self-loathing at the thought. I didn't consider what another would do, or even how I would feel
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–42
tomorrow if I crossed that line today. (I knew that whole "If you do what he does then what's the difference between you?" line of thought. It was never a compelling argument for me to keep myself from doing something morally wrong. I didn't care about being different from the bad guy. After all, the bad guy must have had a good reason, in his mind, for doing whatever bad he did.) Whatever kept me human, kept me from becoming animal, was completely in the moment, a feeling and not a reasoning. I know that anything can be justified through reason, and I could very well have excused myself the next day. But my heart knew what a base device reason can be, a baseness uniquely human. My exalted human spirit wouldn't allow me such a crime, and I felt proud to be human in that moment as the heart quietly set reason aside in this instance of the eternal struggle between the two.
In the time I took to speak the sun had all but vanished. I put my legs up, leaned my chair back, and, supporting myself with my right arm on his chair, said: "I was actually surprised the way it turned out. You would think the heart would be unruly and rush for the gold, and reason would restrain it from doing what's immoral. But after searching in my heart I found it's the other way around sometimes. You reason something out and justify it, but it's the heart that doesn't consent to doing what you know deep down isn't right." …Not surprisingly he didn’t respond–not in words at least. But I wonder what her response would be to my analysis. She’s the one who got me started on this road of idle questioning in the first place. Maybe her randomness had a point too, something I just didn’t pick up on.
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Pranshu Arya–43
Change of perception Toward the end of my stay in Delhi, I took my friend to Le Meridien, a reasonably upscale hotel, for lunch. I wanted to thank him for his hospitality, and since he refused to accept any gifts from me I thought this would be a nice way to do it. We arrived around two and headed straight for Monsoon Restaurant, which serves Mediterranean food. He hadn’t tried Italian food before so we opted for that over Chinese or Indian cuisine, which you can get pretty much anywhere in India. Neither of us wanted to drink in the afternoon so we both opted for spring water lemonade, his sweet mine plain. In time our food arrived, and initially we ate in relative silence interspersed with small talk. There were several other parties having lunch around us, mostly foreigners. At the table closest to us was an elderly couple, probably British (judging from their immaculate dress and ghost-like pallor), with two gorgeous young ladies (maybe their daughters? One thing I learned while traveling is never to make assumptions about relatedness.). My friend commented on the young women and we laughed and observed some of the others present, but then he asked me a simple yet strange question. “Yaar, why is it that people always get together to eat?” “What do you mean?” I wasn’t at all sure. “I mean why is eating the standard social activity? I can’t explain what I mean very well because…well because I’m not sure myself…but I’ve found it strange for a long time, people making plans and then going out together and sitting down to eat. Why can’t people just go out, you know?”
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I didn’t, but I had a response for him. “I think it goes back a long time…I guess it’s because it’s easier to eat together than separately and privately, logistically speaking from the standpoint of the person cooking.” “That’s all fine, but doesn’t it seem like a…” he searched for the word with his knife held steady, unknowingly pointed at me, “messy thing to you? So much can go wrong when food is involved, yet people still go out to eat.” “What can go wrong?” He thought for a bit for words to express his sentiment, searching in his plate even. “OK, let me rephrase. Doesn’t it feel strange to you that people get all dressed up and come to fancy places like this to do something as basic and–if you think about it, far from elegant–as eating?” Before I could respond he spoke again. “Look at these damn foreigners, being all proper with their forks and knives. Look at how they sit, so upright and distant from their food, as if it’s something dirty or diseased. Why the hell do they eat it then?” Mind you we were also eating in the western way, but only because the food and the environment demanded it. At his home we ate Indian food with our hands, with the occasional spoon for yogurt and gravy dishes. I really didn’t care for the subject he’d brought up and initially didn’t respond verbally, only making a smirking gesture to acknowledge him. But then I decided to play devil’s advocate and said, “You don’t…or actually you do know where the chefs’ and food handlers’ hands have been.” I knew it was an unpleasant topic to discuss while eating but I couldn’t help myself. He’d opened the door, after all. Thankfully he caught my drift, but didn’t care to dress up his words.
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“Yeah well we only wipe our asses with our hands; you know what sort of shit these fuckers do in their bedrooms? And then they pretend to be all clean and proper out in public and tell the rest of the world how dirty it is.” I was honestly astonished. He spoke with such disgust and then anger in his voice that I had to stop midway in cutting the breast of grilled chicken on my plate. “At least we don’t fuck in our asses or put our mouths on them.” I actually ejected a small morsel of food back on my plate because I was so shocked. It was hilarious though, and I burst out laughing. He laughed along with me, realizing how ridiculous and funny he was being. “How do you know all this?” I asked him. “Come on yaar, there’s plenty of western porn in circulation around here. Just take a trip down to Paalika Bazaar in CP (Connaught Place). They have pirated prints of everything– Indian, American, Russian…you name it.” I was going to ask him how he was so sure that variety of sex didn’t happen in India but I stopped myself. I’m normally not someone who gets queasy talking about gross things while eating, but I was in an uninspired mood that afternoon and didn’t feel like arguing–especially over this and especially while eating, so I thought of a nice segue from this discussion. “You know, since we’re talking about asses, I saw a fine pair up north.” “Oh yeah? Who were they?” “Two European women, staying at the same hotel as me.” I was talking only a couple of weeks back, when I had been on the road. As I was closing the door to my room from outside and locking it in preparation to go out, two European women, one blonde and the other with black hair, had come out of a room across the narrow hotel hallway and started walking ahead of
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me. “I couldn’t tell where in Europe they were from because all I could see of them from behind was their hair and body-hugging clothes.” “What did they look like from behind?” “Tall, skinny; one had long hair tied in a pony tail and the other had a short boyish haircut. They weren’t particularly curvy but still, great asses on both. Or maybe it was the jeans.” “Man, I’d sell those jeans in my store if more chicks would wear them.” I laughed at his comment and continued, “Once we got outside they placed their arms around each other's back and held each other pretty tightly, drawing attention from every Indian passerby, male and female, adult or child. It was quite a spectacle, and I quietly followed them as long as they were going in my direction.” “Did you find out who they were, if they were together, to be walking so closely like that?” “No, I didn’t, but I thought about that too when they walked in front of me and I saw every head turning to look at them.” I had wondered what the bigger picture was surrounding that moment, that sight for my and so many other eyes to behold: were they being noticeable and provocative just to create a scene for their own amusement, or was there some bigger story behind the closeness of their bodies…
A single panicked accidental moment grotesquely and permanently misshaped her perception of him. Try as she did she couldn’t recover the old illusion that let them have each other.
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Pranshu Arya–47
It's a routine afternoon in the mid-week. They cut class to be together, at his house, in his room; what a spectacular moment. Oh! there rings the doorbell, unexpected, unwarranted! There he is, now pulling out of her, now dismounting from on top of her! Brushing her brusquely he's taken to his feet; panic's taken over his mind! (Who the fuck is it? Where are my clothes? They're downstairs on the couch!) Three steps along the length of the bed and he's at the door… Oh! watch as he trips and almost falls over the computer wire! Now he's stabilized and left the room. She heard it too but didn't react. She didn't mind when he pulled out and off and left her cold. She didn't even mind when he was ungentlemanly as he left the bed. She knew the circumstances and understood his panic. She sat up as he jumped off and watched him go after covering herself. And then he tripped…and then it happened! She saw what was always the truth but never before seen by her eyes. She saw what broke him in her eyes mind and even heart. She saw: when he tripped over the wire, his ass jiggled. How disgusting! she thought. From a split moment's impetus she devised many different pictures of him, each more castrating to his image in her eyes than the next. How can I fuck someone who's soft like my flesh? She had her girls and knew their bodies. Unconsciously she crowded her breasts as she thought of them, but again the jiggling ass came to mind and she wanted to vomit. I need someone hard and strong, she reasoned without reason. There was no reason in her revolt. They were going together a few months and everything was going smooth between them. Watch her torturing her mind with disturbing visions…now she sees him running down the hallway, in the nude. What does she see? Breasts, hips, soft fat as the stomach flying in all
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different directions; it moves lethargically, on a 1-second delay from his nimble movements. She was beside herself, couldn't get over herself. What would she do? She lay down. Calm, she told herself. Watch her now close her eyes and imagine the episode of passion just interrupted. Eyes closed, arms and legs slithering slightly in a rhythm, see her feel him on top of her, inside of her, in her mouth and her hair… Argh! How hideously it jiggled right in front of her eyes… Now watch as his body lying on her turns to jelly, inside her he disintegrates and she feels nothing, no different than she does with any of her girls! From the daring of some fat molecules to dance so much irreversible damage was done. It was as if…as if a dam had burst and unleashed the inevitable, the benign and the ridiculous, with the force with which it came its only legitimate claim to life. (What appeal to live can the jiggle of an ass place before reason?) Pictures never imagined leapt to life like bandits and erased what was actually real; they discredited that reality that went on peacefully before. She tried to revive it with reason (It had gone on so long so well, she thought), to vivify it with intention and even desire, but really it was no use. The new thing was so firmly grounded that it wouldn't be shaken (ha! shaken, she smiled for less than a moment) from her mind or flesh… Now her body perspired from dislike of what before it stood in arousal for. What a sweet sexy jiggling that had been! Her mind was still in the same stream but abruptly flowed in the opposite direction. On an afternoon such as this but in a hotel room, she and Meredith had been gently making love when there was a knock on the door. Meredith had ran (like he had) to get dressed and see to it and she stayed back (like this time). Med's nude body and prominent posterior had danced across the room, and that ass of hers, it had joyously come alive for the dance! She remembered how aroused she had gotten from that sight!
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Pranshu Arya–49
He was coming back. She could hear footsteps approaching from the old wooden floor of the hallway. The memory, she thought, would carry her through for today. She would think about what to really do about him tomorrow, lying in Med‘s arms in their hotel room.
“You know this girl?” “No man, it’s just a story.” I was disappointed that that was the first comment out of his mouth. I was expecting something more along the lines of how funny the story was. But with him I had quickly learned to appreciate what little I got in terms of comments and compliments. “Meredith, though, is based on a real person. This lively guy I met up in Leh met a girl there and was telling me about it. They smoked up together for a few days as they got to know each other. They got a room one afternoon, at a different guest house than the ones they were staying in. They were both traveling in separate groups and the girl didn’t want her friends to know. There really was a knock on the door. She ran to get dressed and he saw what I described, but then they realized it's probably better if he answered." "What did they want?" "The guest house staff wanted to offer them lunch.” “You didn’t mention where this was, where you saw the two European girls.” “Oh, it was in McLeod Ganj.” “There are a lot of Europeans I hear in McLeod Ganj.” “Yeah, the Dalai Lama and Buddhism are really attractive and interesting for foreigners. I was there a week before His Holiness’ birthday, but I met quite a few travelers who had arranged their itineraries so they would be in McLeod Ganj during his birthday celebrations. I’m
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not sure exactly what they do to celebrate it, but I imagine he must have made some sort of public appearance.” Then I remembered something that happened another morning as I walked out of my hotel. “On I think the third morning I was there, I was leaving my hotel to grab breakfast at a local dhaaba, the owner of which I befriended for the few days I was there. Not at all far from the hotel, maybe 60-70 feet down the street, sat a middle-aged Indian man on the side of the road. He looked destitute but he wasn’t begging. He was just huddled there, his knees up to his chin, feet snuggled against his hips on the ground–actually, not to digress too much but I had several foreigners I met on the way point out to me how flexible the bodies of old Indian people are, the way they sit squatted on the ground for hours, chipping away at stones or cooking at the stove or even just sitting. “Anyway, back to what I was saying, there were three people walking in front of me: a foreigner lady directly in front of me, a man of Tibetan descent ahead of her, and an Indian man ahead of him. The man sitting on the ground and the Indian man walking exchanged some sort of brief hello, but then he didn’t say anything to the Tibetan man behind him. The foreigner lady saw this and started yelling at him. She had a thick accent, maybe Eastern European, but not so bad that I couldn’t understand her. She said something like: “Oh, what’s this? He not good enough for you? You say hello to Indian man but not other man because he’s Tibetan?” She was really quite serious and that surprised me, because there could have been many reasons why he didn’t say hello to the other man. Maybe he thought he would be received coldly, or maybe he had to sneeze, or whatever. “The point for me was that the foreigner lady automatically jumped to the worst possible conclusion and started yelling at the guy. Since she chose to judge the event according to
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national lines, I put the situation in perspective the following way: Here’s a foreigner, in India, yelling at an Indian person for not saying hello to a person of Tibetan origin, the leader of whom (and the reason why she’s here in the first place, for her interest in him and his work) is exiled in India. Obviously that’s not a fair picture at all, but it’s only reasonable to evaluate in the context she did.” “Did you say something to her, or to him?” “No way, who was I to get involved? I wasn’t going anywhere near that. She would have probably started yelling at me for being Indian, or American–or both.” “That’s pretty interesting.” As usual with him I wasn’t sure if he was serious or just saying that to say something.
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Pranshu Arya–52
Tiger in my sleep One afternoon my friend was napping on the floor, his body hidden behind the main counter at the store. I sat at the desk in his place. I was reading to pass the time and even dozed off for a few minutes, until a customer arrived. The one employee working that day attended to him but still, I couldn't stay there with my head on the desk and eyes closed when he could be buying something from me (while my friend slept I was the face of business). It was another slow day in a slow season. I couldn’t even make out what day of the week it was. A few minutes later the customer left. He had bought one white and one black wifebeater (sando as it's called in India). I sat there wondering what to do next. I opened the book, reread the page I had fallen asleep to, and then put it down. My friend had had an irregular night, having had to pick up a visitor from the airport at 2 AM. From what he told me, he hardly slept all night because the guest of his family, who shared his room, snored incredibly loudly. (Thankfully I was given my own space when I came to stay with them: the only room on the top floor, where we had beer some nights. It was basic and had one window and a bed. I had to go downstairs to eat and use the bathroom, but for me the inconvenience was worth the privacy. And this way I was also spared the stranger’s snoring.) Unprompted and quite suddenly he turned over and looked at me with red eyes dripping sleep. He said, "A night's rest is a night's rest. You can sleep all you want in the day but it's not the same." I smiled at him to acknowledge the observation and convey some sympathy. After tossing it in my head only for a few seconds I said to him: "Night's sleep is like the wife, daytime naps are like girlfriends." He looked at me with those dead sleepy eyes (the look of a sad puppy dog), mumbled something I didn't hear, and then turned over to try to sleep more.
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I wondered what exactly I had meant by what I said, because I hadn't fully worked out the analogy before blurting it out. I supposed it could mean that you only have one of the real thing, the rest are just space-fillers that can be replaced but don’t replace that original one. Or maybe that you always have the night to turn to for rest, to count on; daytime naps, like casual girlfriends, can't be counted on to deliver dependably and regularly.
Another day, in the morning around 10, as we met up in the TV room for breakfast, he said, “Yaar, I had the funniest dream last night.” “Oh yeah? What?” He remained quiet, signaling with his eyes that he couldn’t tell it within earshot of his mother. When she went back to the kitchen he turned to me. “I dreamt that I was getting married or something…I had just bought a small apartment and we were decorating it before moving in. I came into the bedroom and she was already there. She was standing on a ladder painting the ceiling. It wasn’t just plain paint, she was actually making designs and patterns on it. What’re you doing? I asked her…” He suppressed a laugh before speaking. “She said: ‘Well, my friends all say I’m going to spend a lot of time staring at the ceiling after I get married, so I thought why not make it pretty!’” We both exploded with laughter. His mother brought another round of paranthas and we had to quiet down, otherwise she’d want to know what’s so funny. (“Nothing Aunty, just something on TV…”) I remembered a dream of mine from a while ago, and asked him if he wanted to hear it… "So I'm standing at the corner of a busy intersection somewhere in downtown with her. Some strange people come in a van, do something, and leave. What I see next is a beautiful tiger
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standing at the corner of the intersection. She stands there for a while, and I watch her. I'm scared shitless, but I still watch her. Then she starts going west on the busy road, on the sidewalk. I go to the nearest phone-booth and look up animal control, because I don't want her hurting herself or biting someone. For some reason, a lot of the ads have pictures of lions in them, as if that's a common problem around here. "Anyway, dissatisfied with the ads, I call 911. The guy on the other end is really nice and asks me exactly where she went. Suddenly, I'm instantly transported to another major downtown intersection, except that it no longer resembles downtown. It looks like a rural area. I see the tiger coming from one direction and turning on one of the roads, and running down the road, in the left lane. I tell all this to the 911 operator in detail. He thanks me for providing him with detailed information, and says he's dispatched someone to pick her up. "Some time later (maybe a month, a year, few years, whatever) she and I are driving to what looks like a farm. There's a tiny fence going all around, and about 30 or so feet from the fence is a little shack made wholly of Plexiglas, so it's completely transparent. A guy comes up to me while I'm waiting at the fence and shakes my hand and pats me on the back as if we've had a long-standing acquaintance. After looking around and a careful inspection, he gives us the signal to proceed cautiously to the shack. He follows behind us but doesn't come inside. He goes around and goes and calls someone. Meanwhile, there are animals roaming around everywhere. Every so often, behind some bush, we see figures that resemble tigers, with their distinctive stripes and yellow coat. "What I come to realize is that he's called the tiger that I helped save, and she's running up toward me with a huge smile on her face and a gorgeous gleam in her eyes. I put my hand up to the window and she sticks her paw at me, trying desperately to touch me. There are little
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holes in the window so she can hear me. I stick out my tongue at her and make a childish sound. What happens next amazes and touches me. She repeats what I did, and there's the most beautiful smile on her face that I have ever seen in my life. I make a strange and random motion with my tongue, and when she realizes she can't repeat it, she just stares at me blankly. "After playing with her like that for a while, we set to leave. Once again, the guy looks around and makes sure there are no animals that could endanger us. Unfortunately, there is no safe passage between the shack and the fence, so if an animal attacks you there, you're on your own. Just a little while ago, we saw a herd of giant elk charging down the side of the road, and it only made me think how I wouldn't want to be caught in their path. After giving us the go, we make it safely to the fence. As I face the farm and I'm about to enter the car, I see a horrific site. A black panther is charging at me, while the guy is trying to hold her back. She easily jumps the fence (as does he, by some miracle, while still holding onto her) and runs up to me and starts licking my hand. It's then I realize that it's the same tiger who I know. But now she's a panther. "'She's still a tiger to me.' I told her." "Told who?" "The girl I was with then. We were fighting at the time over something, probably something I said or did, so I was trying to make it up to her with a light story." “So you didn’t actually dream this?” I laughed. “No, but I told it so convincingly that I started believing that I’d really dreamt it.” "Do you remember what you did?" "I think it was around our anniversary. It might have been when I told her that I had our anniversary plans under control when in reality I hadn't done anything or even given a hint of
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thought to it. Obviously that was a ticking time bomb waiting to blow up in my face." I laughed, "Or maybe it was that time I asked her how many girlfriends her dad had before he screwed her mom and got her pregnant and had to marry her…" "Did it work? The story I mean." "Yeah, after I told her she smiled and we laughed and she stared at the ceiling for a while."
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Pranshu Arya–57
Lying for love 1 My friend 2…no, my other friend…is a nomad, hardly ever at home and hardly ever in the city. I met him when I was in McLeod Ganj. He saw me on the bus and instantly struck up a conversation. We hung out for two days there before he unexpectedly went away on the third morning to look for work in another resort town after failing here. I had never met a guy who goes city to city looking for dishwashing jobs and in his spare time reads Midnight's Children and Love in the Time of Cholera. (Fermina Daza's name rolled off his tongue when I asked him about it. He said he had a girlfriend in Srinagar who he thought of as his Fermina.) This was the rare occasion he was without his motorcycle which was being repaired back home in Delhi. To make up for it he expostulated on the virtues of it over the car: "Yaar, the motorbike has a freedom you can't find in a car. There's Delhi traffic, and then cars drink so much fuel. My brother and I would probably fight over who gets it when if we had a car. This way we're both happy with our own bikes. "And the feeling you get riding a bike you can't get from a car. Haven't you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? The way Pirsig describes it is too good! That's just how it feels!" I wasn't informed about his peculiar money-earning and leisurely occupations so he took me by surprise by saying that. I just looked at him like huh, what are you talking about? You did just tell me a little while back that you're here looking for work in a restaurant or guest house, right? My prejudice that reading literature (or reading at all) was exclusively for the educated middle class and above was abruptly shattered.
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"Have you heard of Saratchandra Chattopadhyaya? Bengali writer from back in the day…I have a book of his with me you might like." (Yes, he introduced me to the author I used to quiz my other friend's mother.) We met up before I left Delhi to return home (via a quick detour in Calcutta). He had just returned from Manali, working at a guest house there for a few weeks. We met up for coffee in a restaurant in Paharganj (I don’t remember what it was called or where exactly it was). I talked to him about my other friend. My mouth spoke about my friend while inside my head reeled another strain relating to my own situation.
"Last night I had a moment of insight in the car." "About what?" "I was sitting in the front passenger seat and my friend was driving. His main girlfriend was in the seat behind me. We were listening to music, driving around, and picking on her for her choice of favorite songs on the radio these days. "It's something maybe I read somewhere before or heard, but this time it came to me on its own. You've probably heard it before too: we lie to the ones we love. Have you heard it before?" "I think so…it sounds like one of those common observations people throw around about love, doesn’t it? How'd you think of this?" "I was just sitting there in a moment of silence, looking out the window. I thought about the two people I was with. During the day one of my friend's casual girlfriends (read: fuck buddies) had come by the store to say hello. Then afterwards, toward evening, another had briefly stopped by.
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"It occurred to me that these two and the rest all knew, from my friend, that he had others he slept with…not literally because he never actually fell asleep with them, but anyway…they knew too that he had a serious girlfriend he clearly held above them in his heart. "The one in the car with us, however, had no inkling of his affairs. One time, in fact, he told me that she had picked up his phone when a girl friend…not girlfriend…had called and she had gone livid. The thing that placated her was that the girl on the other end had known who she was, even known her name." I paused for a while and he didn't say anything either, probably sensing that I wasn't done. "You could argue that this is not love–that real love doesn't allow for secrets and fear, because after all, my friend's discretion is motivated by his fear of losing something he values. But, in real terms, this is the love between everyman and everywoman, so I don't hesitate calling it love. I mean, how many couples do you know who don’t fear losing each other when something goes wrong, or don’t have fits of jealousy or suspicion, however rare they may be?” He didn’t say anything so I continued. "I know the depth and sincerity of feelings from both sides. They're only a step away from getting married–would already be weren't it for some small disagreement between him and his parents. So, knowing this, I ascribed my friend's withholding of information from her to a well-meaning cause, and this is what I thought up, that we lie to the ones we love to protect them and ourselves; them from the truth that will hurt them, ourselves from their anger and, more importantly, the possibility of losing them." Veering a bit off-topic I said, "One thing that struck me that I noticed in my friend’s relationship with his several girlfriends: when they talk to him they use the formal tense
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generally reserved for speaking to those older than you, whereas he uses the informal tu (you) and tera (your) in his speech." "Why do you think that is?" He was baiting me, graciously granting me the chance to explain, and I took it. "Where my friend lives and does business is a less well-off part of Delhi, so coming here and staying with him I feel I've entered a slightly lower social stratum. These girls, and I've talked to them quite a bit, are pretty old-fashioned when it comes to relationships (which makes it all the more startling, for me, to see them in a purely sexual association with my friend). They're not welleducated and come from lower-middle class families. "My guess is it's different with the upper classes and better educated. Those women are on a more equal footing with their partners and male counterparts in everyday dealings. I can only go by what I’ve seen–which isn’t much or very comprehensive–but I’ve noticed a clear difference in the way my friend and his girls interact and how Indian couples I’ve seen in upscale restaurants and tourist establishments interact. In the latter case they talk more like friends, versus my friend’s husband-wife rapport with his girls. ” We didn’t say anything for a while and just looked around and outside as we drank our coffees. It was crowded and the street was rarely visible behind the pedestrian traffic. I counted mostly couples and groups of young people among the crowd. I remembered something from before that I meant to tell him. “Did I tell you another observation I made recently? It's related to motorbikes and this difference in women I'm talking about." "No, you didn’t. What did you see?"
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"Well, I've decided the Indian woman has a new identity. At least it’s new to me, coming here after so many years.” “Which is…?” “I noticed that there are two types of women sitting on the backs of scooters and motorcycles now. The one still sits like a ‘proper’ Indian woman, both legs hanging over one side. That’s the type my friend's girlfriends are. But the other, the one that’s new to me, sits like the man riding the bike. Her back is straight and legs are hanging symmetrically across the length of the bike. It was something I never saw before, so for me it’s the image of a modernized Indian woman. I associate with her all sorts of character traits: she’s less afraid of what society thinks, she has a boyfriend and her parents know about him, and she can probably ride a scooter through the mean streets of Delhi… I never saw a woman riding a motorcycle, except one who was dressed like the Terminator and rode a cruiser like him, but that was in Leh. “Other than that I think she probably studies hard, wants to have a successful career and all that good stuff modern women everywhere want." He laughed, and wouldn't tell me why. I was left wondering whether I'd said something that could be considered contentious. "Did you think about what I asked you earlier?" he asked. "No, but I did give you an entire chapter in the book." "Come on yaar, do something. Get me to America. I'll do anything out there, any kind of job. I'll work seven days a week." "You're crazy. Why do you want to leave your family and comfortable life here to work your ass off out there?" After all, I thought, he chose to be a drifter. He could have stayed in Delhi with his family, worked with his dad and brother doing whatever they did.
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Pranshu Arya–62
"I just want to see what it's like. Why's everyone else here running out there like it's heaven on earth?" "They're not. I've met a lot of people who're happy here. I met this guy in Leh who's studying at IIT in Delhi. I asked him if he plans on moving abroad. He said he attended conferences in Toronto and Chicago and some other cities, and even had offers to work and study out there, but he doesn't want to go. He's happy in India. "And he wasn't the only one I met who felt that way. There was this guy who works for a hotel chain–” “Where are you meeting these people?” I guess maybe he thought I was making up stories, which I wasn’t. I didn’t answer him, instead giving him a look to let me speak. “He gets sent to a different hotel every few months, so he's away from his family in Delhi on average three out of every four weeks. He has a friend who's settled in New Jersey. He said he heard–and rightly so–that it's lonely over there, and you don't get the conveniences you get in India." "Like what?" "Like having a servant who cleans your house every morning, does your laundry, and washes your dishes. You can't afford to keep a servant if you're middle class over there. You don't have rickshaws to take you places for ten fifteen rupees, or stores around the corner from your house where you know the owner and can take what you need and pay him back tomorrow or next week." We stopped there but I could see he was unconvinced. Maybe he really just wanted to see what it's like away from the only place he'd always known.
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Pranshu Arya–63
Drinking in metaphor I spent one evening in Kalpa, a short mini-bus ride from Reckong Peo in Kinnaur Valley in Himachal. Kinnaur has been called the most beautiful of all places in Himachal, and I have to agree, especially after seeing the village of Chitkul (not far from Peo). I walked along the road above the town. There were apple orchards scattered along it, and Kailash Parbat stood firm, looming above and beyond the land. I had already rented a room at a guest house in Peo to relieve my luggage but I would have preferred staying in Kalpa overnight. When I was walking, I came across a young man sitting at the top of a series of steps that led down to a guest house/restaurant. He asked me what time it was, and we struck up a conversation. He was just like my other friend because he went from town to town looking for work. He was originally from Rajasthan. He said he used to be a gymnast but a few years ago, before he was to go abroad for a major competition, he became seriously injured and had to give it up. He complained to me of the guest house where he was now working. He said the owner and his wife were neglectful and disrespectful, expecting him to do chores around their house along with managing the guest accommodations. Their son, he said, having nothing better to do, kept a constant eye on him for wasting time chatting with the foreigners who were staying there. He said he wouldn’t stay there much longer; he’d probably take off in the next couple of days. When I asked where he would go next he said he didn’t know yet. He asked me to do him a favor. He wanted to drink that evening, but knew that the owner’s son wouldn’t sell him a bottle for himself. He asked me to pretend that he was getting a bottle of local whiskey for me. I consented, figuring he seems like a genuine guy who I didn’t mind helping. He left me standing at the top of the steps as he ran down to get the bottle. After
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waiting there for a while, just looking around and enjoying the view, I heard a call for me. When I went down, the owner’s son, a young guy of about 20, was holding the bottle in his hand in a bag made out of newspaper. He wanted to confirm that the bottle was for me and not for his employee. After I said it was I took the bottle, paid him, and walked off. While I was doing this, the guy I was doing it for, after pointing me out to the boss’s son, stood to the side of the house entrance and made cheerful conversation with two European girls I presumed were staying at the guest house. None of the three spoke English very well but it was the only language they had in common. Their conversation was very basic (are you having a good time, do you like Kalpa, what did you do, did you eat). I had started walking back down toward the center of town. Five minutes later the guy ran down to catch up to me, paid me, took the bottle, and thanked me for helping him. For some reason it felt natural to not ask people’s names in many situations, to not ask them for any details about them that they didn’t offer up themselves. I met several people while traveling whose names I never learned. Most I only had brief situational conversations with, but there were few others with whom I became fast friends while we were together, and a handful who even helped me. On a train-ride my cell phone was stolen while the train made a quick stop in Bihar. I didn’t see it happen, but those who were sitting around me told me that a man dressed in a cleaner’s uniform pretended to pick up a soda can from my corner. That’s when, we decided, he must have swiped the phone that was inside a large envelope on the little table. When the train arrived at NJP station in West Bengal, the man sitting across from me (whose name I never learned) went with me to the railway office to file a complaint. He warned me ahead of time nothing would come of it–and nothing did–but you should still do it, he suggested. On the
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journey we had talked of many things, including India, America, traveling, society politics and such, but for some reason neither of us bothered asking the other’s name.
Among my friend's many virtues was his love for drink. He most certainly looked Indian but I joked with him that really he must be Irish. He wasn't conceived from Irish sperm or delivered in amniotic whiskey, but my God did he drink. Not rum or vodka or even gin–only whiskey, and sometimes beer. It did something to him, he said. The first glass would go down, on average, in two minutes. We'd be talking and the second glass would be duly prepared. In the meantime effects were arising. One evening he watched it at work so he could describe it to me. (I wanted to write about it I told him.) It was hot like every other day. We were on the roof again late at night, outside my room. It was a large space, enough to hold maybe 30 people. The corner on our left and closest to us was the staircase leading down, but the rest of the three corners each had a big plant in them (I don’t know which kind). On both sides the neighbors had taller houses, so we didn’t have much of a view to either side of us. Wet clothes hung to dry on three separate clotheslines in the empty space behind us. We spoke less; I looked at him intently. I wasn't sure how he would deliver, whether it would be a play-by-play report or a single drawn out discourse from gradually diminishing ability. Either way, here's how he put it: "The head begins to get cloudy. Its' not a hazy cloud. It's racy and courageous but it's weak, only a child. Still it captures you, you wonder upon it, want to see what it's capable of. The first glass is full of love. You feel gentle toward it as it lightens your mood. The cloud feels faintly electric, like it’s raising the hairs of your consciousness.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–66
"I say it's like a child because the intoxication doesn't want you to part from it. The second glass beckons and you simply don't have the heart to refuse. Your mind is at such a place, under an almost inaudible buzz, that you'd like to not brake the train you're on. A train that's the smoothest you've ever ridden, carried forward on an invisible track in the Milky Way of the mind as if without any energy at all. "With subsequent glasses the buzzing gets louder, the galaxy the train is riding through gets bigger, the child morphs into both a beautiful woman and a dangerous animal. You're on the train and the train is in your head, simultaneously, but sublimely separate. You want to lie down and focus on the buzzing; there's something in its air because it's not a sound you hear but feel. By now you're on top of the cloud and the other world seems beneath you, a safe distance away. It's been stripped of its dark unpleasant colors and simply sits in a nude silver; you can look upon it and with each long sigh strip it some more of undesirable reality. You're not painting it a shade more pleasant, but to rise above as you've done is relief enough. "If, by incident or accident your thought turns to time (thought is still present), you realize how it's slowed. Causes and effects don't matter because they're dissolved in time. The buzzing flows, the train goes, toward the woman, away from the animal. Time has slowed but your conscious rhythm is kept up by the beckoning woman and chasing tiger, so you drink more to get closer to one and farther from the other…" This exposition he delivered to me on the morning after. He didn’t remember me walking him down the steep steps to his room when his utterances were no longer words. Although he'd started out quite well as we began to drink the night before, slowly his (speech) train lost speed, started derailing, and kept circling the same few stations before it fell away altogether. What he said while drinking is not worth repeating. The morning-after account,
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although not a live one and overly poeticized, serves the critical purpose of betraying his bend toward metaphor and the sanctity of drink to him (to poeticize and romanticize it the way he did).
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Pranshu Arya–68
Lady with the pacemaker How long can you keep pulling on life when death decides to finally beckon? "Just five more kilometers," he told her, "we need to be strong, don't we?" We in the front seat nodded passively. Ten minutes passed in silence. She had been gagging every ten seconds or so. When she couldn’t bear it anymore we stopped the car and she got out and vomited on the side of the road. Out of frustration and also concern he asked how much farther. My friend assured him, "Just five kilometers bauji, we're almost there." I hadn’t known this friend–Roshan was his name (it means shining light)–before and I wouldn’t know him after this journey, but while we were together we got along well. I was particularly amused by his preparation of chewing tobacco. He prepared it carefully, as if it were a religious ritual. He would remove the pouch from his shirt pocket, and then, taking some into his left palm, he would expertly crush it, press it, and then filter it by tossing it from left hand to right then back again. After enjoying his tobacco, followed by a brief rest period from it, he would start again. Forty minutes of the hour-long journey had passed this way. Twenty minutes into it we had already traveled halfway according to him, and twenty kilometers (of 36) according to the other, her husband sitting in the backseat. It was well beyond dusk and the fog had reduced visibility to 10 feet in some places. The road was unpaved, six inches of water in some places from the incessant rain of the day. It was wide enough for one-way traffic (like everywhere in the mountains), and every 50 meters was another hair-pin turn challenging Roshan to maneuver safely. I was sitting silently in the front passenger seat, sympathy causing worry and making me cringe at the sounds of her suffering. My frustration was stifled inside because I realized the
Proposal from Calcutta
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others were suffering too. But why were we in such a hurry? The woman with the pacemaker can't take the stress, especially after the day she'd had. He brought her to visit Kedarnath, the pilgrimage to Lord Shiva high in the mountains, before she departed this earth. Up there oxygen was thin and she could barely stand on her own. A carriage hoisted on four sets of shoulders carried her 14 km on dung-laden stone paths, gaining 2 km in altitude on the journey. She managed to visit the shrine and start the trip back, just when it started raining in signature monsoon style–not hard and forceful but gentle and beautiful. We gained respite only when we reached the base again after three hours. Her elderly husband and I were fully soaked from the waist down. I had an umbrella and he a thin disposable plastic raincoat which offered some protection. I had removed my socks early on and my left ankle was chaffing against my wet shoe. Now we were returning in wet clothes sticking to leather seats, our white Ambassador car leading us bravely through thick fog in the black of night. The lady with the pacemaker was shivering and groaning and gagging, holding on to life as her husband held her hand and kept her warm. How did he view her, I wondered sitting there helplessly. An asset, a liability (especially now in this old age); a friend and companion or just someone to play the role of wife; a means to perpetuate his last name that her father gave to him along with cash furniture jewelry? What choice did her father have, he had a blossomed burden on his hands and society's eyes were watching him closely. They must have barely spoken before he brought her to her new home. In those initial days and years was she the mistress of it or a servant to her husband and new parents? If she was a mere servant, was she sustained by the dream that one day she'll dominate her yet-to-be-born son's young virgin bride the way she felt she was being done?
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–70
And what was her perspective? I imagined her life's synopsis in her own words: "I was born. I was brought to your house. I cooked and cleaned for you and maintained your household. I delivered you three children and raised them. Now it's time for me to go." But those were the old days. (She had grandsons my age; how accurately could I voice her perspective?) To judge them with today's eyes was a mistake. (Wasn't in true, I thought, that the desires of the people of a particular age kept in time with the trends of that age?) It dawned on me the skeletons of some relations weigh more than the flesh that fills them. Take a newly-wed couple in India whose families arranged their union and they’re relative strangers to one another. It is to this new woman’s sanctimonious label as his wife that the man now suddenly entrusts his possessions, material and otherwise–not to her character or integrity of being (he hasn’t had the chance yet to observe these qualities in her). The same holds for the woman, who brings her devotion and reputation to place under her husband’s and in-laws’ discretion, at the beckoning of social custom and her family’s wish. On the horse-ride down from God's abode her husband told me of one night back home in Delhi. “Her pulse had hit 36. We had to have a pacemaker installed.” I hadn’t quite followed because never would I have imagined anyone even thinking about (let alone really attempting) such a journey with a pacemaker keeping them alive. He had said, “I don't think she can handle going anywhere else. If she can make it back to the hotel tonight I'm going to take her straight home tomorrow morning.” But still he kept pushing. Once we were safely back in the car there was a lively argument between the three (husband, wife, and Roshan) about where tomorrow would lead. He wanted to take her to Badrinath (another pilgrimage, to Lord Vishnu) and said she could do it if she held strong, she yelled that she couldn't and won't; he could go by himself if
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Pranshu Arya–71
he was that intent on it. Roshan played the diplomat between the two, but naturally he was leaning toward taking the old woman home. We made it safely to the hotel and went straight to sleep. The next morning it was decided they would head back to Delhi. My friend would drive them to Haridwar where he had initially picked us up. (I met the old couple on the train from Delhi to Haridwar when the old man started talking to me quite randomly. We were both headed to the same places so he invited me to share a car with them. The old lady hardly said a word to me the entire trip.) I said goodbye and separated from them mid-way because I was headed for Badrinath. …What would she want, the lady with the pacemaker, if she were a young woman today…like the one I asked to marry me? Would her sensibilities, familial desires, womanly wants…would these be different than what they were back in her young days? I don't know. The closest I managed to get to the Indian female psyche–besides my conversations with my friend's mother–was to watch the abysmal serials that kept millions of these women glued to their televisions every evening. Even my friend's mother reveled in them. "Hurry up, I have to make it home in time to watch so-and-so serial," I heard her say on several different occasions. I even remember one evening, in a small village of 250 people in the north, where I made an unplanned stop only because the bus I was on was packed beyond twice its intended capacity… I got off the bus and climbed on the roof to get my bag. It was covered in dust from the journey because the road–like most roads in the mountains–was unpaved and the region was high in altitude and arid. Once the bus left I stood on the side of the road and looked around and thought, "Where the hell am I?" To my left was the road going forward, to the right the road that brought me here; ahead of me (across the road) was a restaurant (Quality Hotel or something similar it was called) that looked closed, and behind me was the village. Children were playing
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–72
with a partially inflated volleyball in the middle of the road before and after the bus' intrusion on their turf. It was late in the evening when I arrived and it was starting to get dark. Thankfully a local came up to me and asked me if I needed help. I asked him if he knew of a guest house I could stay in for the night. He led me through the village where I struggled to keep up with him with my heavy backpack. Where we were walking there was no road or even sidewalk. There was only about four feet of dirt and grass to walk on between low walls of about four feet high that separated private property on either side from the walkway. We were sharing this space with cattle and sheep that were being brought back after a day of grazing. A shallow open channel ran down the middle of the pathway and served as a divider between humans walking on one side and animals on the other. The village was settled below the road, so it was an easy walk down. The stranger brought me to a house that was the biggest in the village from what I could see all around me, and talked privately with the owner while I waited outside. It turns out the house had guest accommodation on the upper floor of the house but the family didn't like to use it as a hotel or a guest house. They were nice enough to make an exception for me and let me stay one night. I settled down and went for a quick stroll around the village before it got completely dark. When I returned the lady of the house invited me to join her and her daughterin-law for dinner. I had seen the young girl when I first arrived but wasn't sure who she was. The way she was dressed and working so hard my initial impression was she was a servant. Only later I learned that she was the younger daughter-in-law of the house. The man of the house and his sons were in the nearby town of Kaza for work. The older daughter-in-law was a teacher in a school there. That left the lady, the young girl, and a male servant to watch the house.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–73
We sat down for dinner in a beautiful sitting area, well-decorated with photographs on the walls and colorful rug on the floor. While we ate the women were largely silent because they were immersed in the serial on television. (I noticed a satellite dish outside the upstairs door before climbing up a ladder and entering.) As I ate quietly I observed with amazement how these women, who were so far physically and culturally from the civilization of the big cities, had incorporated the mindless gibberish of Hindi TV serials into their relatively primitive but industrious lives. It was proof to me of the universality of female thought, that even though these women had no real-life basis to relate to the one-dimensional characters on TV with, they still became caught up in the drama of their lives. I sat and watched in wonderment as both the old and the young ladies of the house glued their eyes to the TV until the string of shows was over. These are shows made (I think) by women for women (that part I have no doubt about). What is the content and style of these shows? They are entirely unoriginal, unsophisticated, formula-driven dynamite leads of conflict between you-name-it: husband and wife, father and son, sisters, brothers, families, and–most popular and common–mother and daughter-in-law. The same actors can be seen in several serials (I watched a few with my friend's mother on idle evenings in Delhi). The women are either vindictive and self-obsessed bitches or family- and society-abiding virtuous virgins–there is no middle ground. The characters are disgustingly black-or-white and the stories are, without fail, variants of conflicts along a handful of themes: money, religion, and tradition. Who are the virtuous women? The married ones worship their husbands and in-laws; they observe rites and traditions religiously; they silently tolerate injustice at the hands of in-laws (everyone lives as a joint family in a magnificent mansion); they make innumerable sacrifices for
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the family's good name in society. The unmarried ones love and respect their parents (who worry primarily about getting them married off); their big dream in life is to either be an independent and successful career woman or to meet a good and worthy man and become his wife; they dream of wearing his henna on their hands, his sindoor (red powder) in the parting of their hair (it's a sign of a married woman), and fasting to pray for his long life (he doesn’t have to reciprocate). Inadvertently one of two things happens and the drama begins: they fall in love with someone and one or both families disapprove, or they have an arranged marriage and their in-laws give them hell. A scene from an episode I saw while idling in Delhi, eating dinner with my friend’s mother: A young woman is being thrown out by her husband for having relations with another man. When he’s screaming at her she interjects at least ten times but he doesn’t let her speak, but it becomes clear to the viewer that the woman was not committing the sin of adultery and that something altruistic and maybe even virtuous drove her to the other man. (Had I watched prior episodes I no doubt would have known what that selfless reason was.) Anyway, her husband continues with his tirade until she finally stops him–not to explain herself at last (no, that would be too simple)–but instead to submit to his will and deliver a touching inner monologue, something along the lines of “I must have done something wrong in a previous lifetime to be placed in this position…he’s not to blame, how can I blame him…I will always love him and always worship him as my husband…” She starts to leave. The shot of her walking away (specifically from the point where she turns her face away from his to when her shoulders move past his) is immediately repeated three times, with a gunshot sound each time. After that a close-up of every face present (there are at least 10 people standing in the background, none of whom have said a word the entire time). The close-ups start out in color
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but end up in black-and-white, on each face, again with a sound effect each time (a thunder sound this time). Finally, as the fallen woman is about to exit the marvelous mansion through the main gate, the husband’s elderly aunt walks in and asks what’s going on. She’s told in brief, after which she immediately comes to the woman’s rescue and even slaps her nephew for suspecting his goddess of a wife. But he won’t be dissuaded. Again, there are more in-your-face shots of everyone present (still only three of whom have spoken over the span of about 6-7 minutes; you can actually see boredom and sense apathy in some of the other faces). Through a sad song borrowed from a Bollywood movie (they do that a lot, which leads me to wonder if they pay royalties for the music they borrow), the woman walks out of the house, bringing the episode to a close. Like I said, this was the extent of my insight into the female psyche. So I wonder, if this is what the women of India watch tirelessly every evening, they must feel some sort of affinity and share thoughts and ideas with these flat annoying and sometimes abominable television characters. If an Indian woman's main desire in the old days was to marry a good husband, for her sake and her family's, I can't say how much that has changed over the generations that have passed.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–76
Lying for love 2 Now for my turn… I admit I lied to her. (It's easy to admit because it's been so long that it feels like a different time and a different me; an old movie where the people weren't the ones that exist today.) I lied about where I was, who I was with, what I was doing. But it wasn't that I was hiding another woman. I never cheated on her. Why do people cheat anyway? My explanation is that there are several contradictory drives inside us–not just in terms of sex but also love money career. To put it succinctly, the two main drives are like two race cars on an empty racetrack. The one stands for stability, security, predictability, comfort, intimacy; the other for excitement and newness. These two modes of desire are forever racing inside us, against each other. Sometimes it just happens that the latter pulls ahead to win over our senses and attention for a while. It’s why married people cheat, why responsible people gamble, and why honest people lie. It is–to bring it closer to home–why I proposed to her the way I did. Something unreasonable took over as soon as I heard her voice, and–even though I didn’t become devoid of reason (I recognized what I was doing was irrational in a bigger picture somewhere)–the feeling inside me wanted to sustain itself for its own cause, the feeling of…purpose and vitality and romance and movement. She was always complaining of me to me. I asked her why don't you complain to someone else, or just leave me if you're that unhappy. But she didn't leave; it would be me to eventually leave her. I lied because she didn't understand–and everyone says that, it's every guy's complaint that his wife or girlfriend doesn't understand him. Then why do we still keep on having wives and girlfriends? It must be that other, slower steadier drive inside…
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–77
I wanted to go to a concert of an emerging Asian underground band from London. She didn't know about it yet, but she would want to go with me–not because she would enjoy the music but because she liked to be near me, and convey to me once more that she supports my endeavors and my tastes in things. I knew she didn't like that sort of music, and I wanted to spare her the seeming torture (in my eyes) of sitting there for a few hours, enduring something she doesn't like, only because she didn't have the heart to say no when I asked her if she'd like to go with me. I was well aware of what the torture is like, for I'd been to several events with her and others because I myself hadn't had the heart to say no. I knew that the girls knew that what they were dragging me into weren't my idea of a good time (such as an opera, and a home interiors show), but I justified their insistence as a gesture of wanting to spend as much time with me as they could, and so I felt I shouldn't say no. I wanted to come straight out to her. I wanted to sit her down at the kitchen table one evening and say: “Look honey, there’s this concert I want to go to and I don’t want you to come with me.” But of course I wouldn’t say that. I thought of something more sensitive: "Look honey, there's this concert I want to go to. I know you're not a fan of their music, so I don't want to make you feel like you have to go with me. I know you might want to go with me anyway, just to spend time together, but I just wanted to let you know that you don't have to do that to show me you care for me. I know that anyway, deep in my heart. But if you'd still like to come with me, I'd be ecstatic." I wasn't sure, however, how she would interpret it. My intentions were clear in my mind, but to make them clear to another–no matter how close the other is to you–is a venture rife with uncertainty. I toyed in my mind with the possible ways she could react in. …I picture her sitting, three feet across from the table from me, in a summer dress (with lilacs on it), the one she wore all the time just for me… Her wondrous skin still enchanted me
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and drew me the way it had the moment I first saw her. But now, after our time together (i.e., after I was secure in the thought that she belonged to me), the fear factor was no longer there. I was no longer afraid of being kept from that supple skin, the way I'd been in the lively days of our courtship. I'd walked on eggshells then, watching myself every moment not to say or do something that might turn her off and away from me. It was the sweetest agony I'd ever tasted (and it wasn't the first time I'd tasted it; my former affairs had had similar beginnings), and I was aware of how my own mind reveled in the romantic uncertainty of what lay ahead for me, for us. My heart must have worked a beat or two faster for those two months we were getting to know each other. I'd done it all for the feel of that skin, and for the feeling of being taken and had, because I knew too well what loneliness felt like. (I ran from it like a moth from a hot flame. The knowledge that both the flame and the moth were artifacts of my overactive mind didn't help to lessen the agony of boredom.) "What were her reactions like, in general? How would she react?" I pondered the general and the specific, sometimes separately sometimes together, as I sat at the kitchen table with only her ghost across from me for now. "You want to go without me?" "I didn't say that." "Then?" "I'm just saying you don't have to go just because you want to be nice. I know for a fact you don't like their music so I don't want to make you feel like you have to come to give me company." "Alright, whatever."
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–79
Whereas idle sensitivities seem to bother most people at rare times, they tend to define a select few others, who couldn’t overcome them if their life depended on it. Wandering eyes, drifting thoughts, nervous concerns are all characteristics of these esoteric people. They sacrifice themselves for the moment, every moment. Naturally every moment can’t meet their expectation, so they get let down. Every moment holds infinity in its womb, but in terms of birthing it, life has a very low survival rate at this stage of evolution for these people. They’re the ones to whom ecstasy should never happen because once it does, it lingers in their conscience for a long time and leaves them longing for the lost moment. They have trouble moving forward, like something sticky that’s tough to remove from the ground, but once you get it off, shoots forward in space and sticks to the next thing it finds. They discover as they walk through life that offering yourself is an art, a science that’s graphed on an inverted-U curve. You can give so much that the return is no longer justified (not that you give with the expectation of that return, but sooner or later you’re bound to make the observation and connection). And so, after some stumbling steps, they begin to give less and in return receive more, and question how this can be, because by their very nature they want to give everything and receive everything. …We were both sensitive but in different ways. She could cry over my apparent lack of concern and get it over with; she could walk away, she could yell. She was outwardly sensitive to my words and actions. I was sensitive to the letting down of my own expectations, only I didn't show it as much. She gave of her heart and so did I, only I didn't show it very well. My giving, I see now, was the wrong kind; I gave unexpectedly when it was unwarranted–something she wasn't wired or nurtured to appreciate. (And I, stubborn animal, never could adapt to another way.) She was out in the open and I was inside my head…
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–80
“Life lives inside my head,” I said. “OK,” said she. It was one of those complete-in-a-vague-way one-liners that roll around inside my head until I let it out. The chasm between us couldn’t be erased. But I loved her still–not for love’s sake but the purity I saw and admired in the love she had for me, as it appeared to me. I envied her that simple two-dimensionality (as seen from my limited egotistical viewpoint), that absence of anything extending out of her and behind that I couldn't see into… I walked circles around her consciousness (which I froze in space and time) but still there wasn't anything that resembled a depth I wasn't privy to, only two dimensions. …I had no broad or narrow dream or vision for the world, not even a pipeline where such dreams could reside. All I wanted was to be happy, satisfied, satiated. Everything–the only thing–I wanted was for me, which might be why I didn’t achieve anything I desired. There are two roads to fulfillment, one that goes from the outside in, the other radiates out from within. That is, some say to be happy yourself make others happy, while the opposite side argues how can you make someone else happy if you’re not happy yourself? Which is correct? This is what I sat wondering in response to her response, which wasn’t caustic, not even indifferent, but it sunk me still, deeper into myself and farther from her. I was left feeling we’ll end but without the will and energy to make it happen that very moment. Maybe my predicament was precipitated from her speaking the truth so often. Her heartfelt professions of love, one day to the next, they added up to a feeling of suffocation. The gulf between ever-increasing love and ever-decreasing understanding was getting wider, and I watched it doing so inside my mind. It was giving rise to doubt and unsettlement, that how could she love me if she didn’t understand me? Who is it she loves… But what kind of thing is that to
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–81
be complaining about? When the whole world is running after love, in a world so lonely, would I dare be ungrateful for it? No… What is this love object, this bleeding of one heart into another? It makes us blind. How does it happen? Love is crazy…it permits us to go to the theater with one person and not feel a single thing, because the heart is so attached to someone who’s not at the moment present… I guess that’s how love should be, but when the relationship with the object of attachment is itself fuzzy and more a matter of attachment than anything else, it’s unnerving to me how blind love can be.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–82
Conversation with my friend I started traveling without any books in tow to cut down on weight and because I figured I wouldn’t have much opportunity to read; I figured I would listen to music instead. After my music player was stolen from my jeans pocket in Karol Bagh two days after arriving in India, I was too agitated and annoyed to go book shopping before heading off to Shimla, my first of many destinations. Once there, though, I realized I required something to read for all the random unoccupied hours of the day. My first full day there I spent hanging around Mall Road and visiting Jhaku Temple (where I almost got attacked by a monkey who I was later told are expert at stealing hats and sunglasses). In the evening I had dinner at a nice restaurant on Mall Road and then headed back to the YMCA, where I got lucky and bagged the last available room (in the high season that it was). On the way I made a short stop for a saada paan (plain paan–mouth freshener). Just past Christ’s Church, before the narrow lane leading up to the YMCA, there was some sort of street fare where people were selling clothing, toys, and household items. In the back I found a bookseller, and from him I bought a few books at dirt cheap prices: Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and Tipping Point and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Only when I got back to my room and opened them (they were shrink-wrapped) did I realize that the Gladwells were so cheap because they were photocopies! After Shimla I made it a point to seek out and browse used book stores wherever there was one that I traveled to. I found some obscure books in the most surprising of places in India. In McLeod Ganj, for instance, I came across a used but good copy of Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fe, a book I couldn’t locate in Borders or Barnes & Noble when I was looking for it back home. In Leh, civilization far and isolated from civilization, I traded in Love in the Time of Cholera for a lesser-known book of Joseph Heller’s. I only knew of him through Catch-22 fame, which I
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–83
never read, but I considered him a safer gamble than choosing some completely unheard of writer. (I would be on the road, stuck with the books I chose for an unknown period of time, so I had to choose carefully.) I bought and read a few other books too, trading them in as I went along. Back in Delhi, I was reading a selection of short stories I purchased from a street-side vendor in Connaught Place for Rs. 150 when I remarked to my friend: "Literature seems to me, from what I've read lately, a game of analogy and metaphor. You talk about the sky and compare it to something mundane like a silver candy wrapper, or you call it something profound like the work of God's hand. Or you talk about the day and how it resembles a beautiful flower or a hellish nightmare (if it happens to be a bad one). Body parts soak sunlight, garbage looks like poetry, blood boils and lungs burn–it's a bottomless void this world of 'like' and 'as'. It's getting a bit much for me to read this artificial depth every day." "But you write in metaphor. That piece on drinking and how it feels, what was that?" "Yeah, I actually don't like that one too much. After I wrote it I was drinking one evening–not with you, this was somewhere else–and I felt that drinking doesn't feel like how I had you describe it at all. It just feels like you're drunk, so as far as I'm concerned all that poeticizing (as I then put it) was a waste of words and effort on my part."
"Have you noticed how conversation in some novels serves to deliver the author's thoughts on philosophy and opinions on all sorts of topics?" I said. "That's because it's tough to incorporate those things in the narrative. Some ideas can’t be conveyed directly, especially feelings. These things you have to tell through a story, where
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–84
you don’t speak the idea explicitly; instead, the reader picks up on it through identifying with the characters and noticing the similarities amongst them and himself…” He was echoing my own idea from our last such conversation back to me! He continued: “All you usually find in the narrative is the color of the clothes and the texture of the living room floor and details like that." "But doesn't it seem like a cop-out to you? Quickly create some sort of setting and then build some characters to be literary mouthpieces for all your profound ideas on life and love and the rest of it?" "How would you prefer it done?" I smiled, "You're just waiting to catch me and call me out aren't you?" "How?" "I'm doing the very thing I'm complaining about–putting across an idea of mine through this conversation we're having." "Go on." "I don't know," I sighed, "maybe I've read too many old books but I find it a higher form of writing the way some authors write directly, putting forth lofty ideas outside quotation marks in equally mighty and abstract words. Like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Hesse. Have you read Gogol’s Dead Souls, or Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence?” “I’m not the one who reads, remember?” He was referring to my other friend with his penchant for literature (who I had told him about). “Oh yeah, sorry.” I took a sip of chai which had gotten cold. “I was just going to say that there are passages in those books that stand on their own two feet. They’re not contextual or
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–85
situational, even though they are…an entire passage you can just pluck out of the book and read and gain satisfaction from.” We weren’t on the roof drinking beer this time, but at his store, without any customers to tend to. I judged it was around 4 because the chaiwalla (tea delivery guy) had made his second and final round of the day about ten minutes ago. “I think there’s a difference between great writing and great story-telling, and they don’t always go together. These days, I think, the emphasis is more on great story-telling than great writing. I guess that’s what sells.” “What’s the difference? I mean how can you have one without the other?” “A great story is like exiting your skin for a little while. The events and characters and everything about it let you live in another world while you’re reading and imagining. But it’s just that. You put the book away and you’re done with it till you open it next time. It doesn’t linger in your heart and mind, making you read and reread a passage or paragraph because it’s so potent and loaded. “That’s what great writing does; it’s your thoughts and emotions given voice. Someone else wrote them but they’re your words. You read and you say ‘Hey, I’ve felt that same way before, I just didn’t know how to say it.’” After a moment: "On the other hand…" I recalled something on the original topic of conversation and narration. "On the other hand, I just finished reading a novel that had equal amounts of both styles–conversation and monologue (in the form of a diary), and direct statements in the narrative. Both were there to express lofty ideas in mighty words. I found it an insightful read overall, full of single-liners that weighed heavy with meaning, but at times it was just a bit too much–too heavy, too monotonous, and even boring sometimes. It felt like relief to
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Pranshu Arya–86
read the mundane bits of dialog the author had interspersed throughout the book to carry the plot forward. "I guess you need a good balance between both styles," I concluded, "and, even more, a balance between the light and the heavy, the mundane and the meaningful." "What was the book about?" To my surprise I'd managed to raise his attention to my words beyond his usual two-word responses. "About a young guy, our age actually, who's directionless and loveless in his young life. He's so insightful (lofty ideas in mighty words) that I wondered whether he's not schizophrenic." "Does he get the girl?" "How do you know if there's a girl?" "There has to be. You've already said it's such a heavy read. If there's no girl to lighten the mood it would be an absolute bore to read." "He doesn't get her. She gets married to his best friend, or so it's suggested…it's not explicitly stated the wedding happens." He laughed, "Sounds a lot like your book." I laughed out loud. "It does actually, doesn't it?" I was genuinely surprised and taken aback at the likeness. "But it's not. If it were, whoever was my girl would be marrying you, and that's not happening. You already have a monopoly over women in this story, even if they're all collective and nameless, so you're not getting mine."
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–87
Leech Like a leech, latch onto love. Suck soft skin sore. Emotion raging forth at the speed of black, Burning every moment to devour all, blood bones and bile. On the bed, lying pathetically miserably at the mercy of; Alive each moment only to show no mercy. Anger darker than night, rage mightier than elephant; Love loftier than lust, hate hotter than hell. Throw away humanity, succumb to ego. Envision grandiose, absurd and superlative, unthinkable and immortal. Leave a stain, leave a mark. One for the books, one for the veins, one for the tears, for the morning after that won’t come. Stress the word so pen breaks, paper pierces, hand cramps; Word strong as sea, strange as self, somber as sunset.
"Let's please just end this." I told it to her outside, in the open, at a street intersection where a tall building stood next to us. We were dwarfed but our problems were bigger than everything around us. She held back tears and turned around and walked away. I remained standing. I felt relieved. As she walked away I haughtily reasoned… I don't want a woman next to me when I go to sleep. I want a woman under me when I'm making love to her. I don't want a woman nagging the hell out me over some asinine detail she's accusing me of having overlooked (all the while as my mind orbits scenarios of yelling matches slamming doors shattering glass). I want a woman to tell me clearly and concisely what she wants and what she expects–without the charge that I should already know what she wants and expects… A wind of vision was blowing through as she walked on, getting further from me on the long straight sidewalk… A woman who's willing to let her
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–88
personality melt into the collective personality of the world, and her body melt into mine. I'm going to tell her "I think you're beautiful," and she'll know I say it to every beautiful girl I meet, but yet she won't take offense… Maybe that was too much to ask, I realize now… She'll be content with the fact that she's not special, that I'm not special, that we're just two blocks of a giant Lego structure. To fall for you would be the fall of me. That's something I should have thought out at the beginning, even before I got into her. But in this life we have so many devices we lean on to defy blame and culpability. In love’s court fate is often whored out as the guilty one, to be blamed for that deliberate misstep. Even if going in you have a hunch nothing good will come of it, still you touch the fire, and when the first burn doesn’t burn enough, in the ecstasy of foolish consciousness you dive greedily in to be scorched from all corners by flames of rapture. …How unreasonable my thought was…how could I have known going in what would come out of it? I remember, alongside relief, I was feeling let down by myself. You should have known, I said to myself, and you should have told me…you should have known all that I didn’t and forewarned me. My honest sincere indignation started and ended with me. I can say with confidence I didn't know what I was doing then. Losing her made a poet out of me but I didn't anticipate it. I thought she would come back to me. It happened before, and it would happen again, I thought. I desired her still, and she still loved me, so I took it for granted and started walking away in the other direction… When you emerge you’re brittle and jaded, but after attending to your wounds and letting them be, when you sit and reflect, you discover there’s little resentment and even lesser regret. Who’s to blame for the way it went down? Perhaps you didn’t know going in what it was you’re going into, but you’re still man enough to accept responsibility for your actions, however
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–89
impulsive and out-of-brain they may be. And add to that the sweet poetry of fate’s “it was meant to be,” and you emerge a poet, stung by life’s bittersweet venom and deliriously grateful for the way it feels under your skin. …I ended it but didn't move on. She did. What a silly position it was for me, really. I chuckle now when I remember it, but I was angry then. It felt like she hit me in the groin. I grew angry, not with her but at myself, for feeling incapable of reaching the point of rage where I would drop all reasonable judgment. Who was I kidding, I wasn't an angry person. All I could do was write out this half-real anger in attempt to legitimize it… Out of anger knowing no bounds I wish I could write the shit out of you. Wring you out with words till you’re dry of blood and breath. Every letter I write spells the end of you, each word contributing to the negative that, once developed, reveals your new non-existence that’s my sole doing. I’m so angry I won’t raise a single muscle except to write. The pen is mightier than the sword. You’re fucking right it is. I won’t even picture the ink flowing out of my pen as your blood draining life out of you–no, what’s going to be your death is only my words and no relative thereof. You said you'd never love again or another. I don’t know what to believe in anymore, least of all who to believe in. Your words–yes, your words–are the hook I hang my coat on, only to discover when I go to leave that you’re gone, the hook’s gone, and of course my coat’s gone. I’m left not only alone but cold and shivering in the fucking rain to fend for myself where only hours ago I thought I had security assurance and support. Worst of all, watch as tomorrow I reconcile myself after a night of torture and tears and trust you and hang my coat again…
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–90
It stops here. My words will stop it here. I might break the pen because I’m so angry but that won’t signify the death of you. My words alone–not how forcefully I write them, whether I tear through the paper, whether I leave the pen to the paper a little too long so it blots–nothing but my fucking words will end you. No analogies or metaphors. Only words fatally unquenchable as my thirst for vengeance… I knew when she said she wouldn’t love another that she would (everyone does after all), and still I hung on her words… Vengeance for what I wonder now… Of course it didn't stop, I didn't stop. Even when my hand stopped my mind kept writing… It was only a matter of two months (after our years together). While I was idling between gears I learned she was seeing and sleeping with an old friend (of hers, not mine or ours). Although I had no ground or authority to say anything, in heart's land reason is pauper. So I wrote to her all the things I didn’t feel justified to say to her courage face (she moved on after I let her go, what validated my feelings?). I let loose one storm after another, half hoping it’ll deal a fatal blow and half that she’ll see the lone shepherd sitting on the rock and hear his faint call. Either way there would be tears, whether angry and self-righteous or pacified and remorseful. I would wait, in fear and in angst… She didn’t dignify my feelings with a response because I didn’t send her what I’d written. My proud self-respect (through my will to appear unaffected) won out over any vain desire for vindication. When I realized she wasn't coming back I had resentments and even more regrets. Anger faded as if it had never existed and sadness and self-pity set in. I started crying and couldn't stop. It was partly artificial but I kept doing it anyway. It was clear as day to me that I'll get over this but that didn't change the fact that I was hurting then.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–91
I asked… What is it that makes me hurt? She's with someone who'll treat her much better than I did… But I wasn't hurting for her; I was hurting for me. I had done something I felt had to be done (ending with her) but that did not immunize me from the virus of sentimentality. She had a leather jacket of mine from the early days, a claim to stake on me and mine. I wondered whether to ask for it back, whether it would hurt her if I did. I knew I would hurt if she didn’t. In this brief relapse her memories became dearer to me than she herself…the way she snuggled herself into my chest and moaned, sometimes loudly, as I unclipped her bra and cupped her warm breast in my cold hand, as I reached between her legs and pleasured her in the backseat of my car. I remember… I called her this morning. I got up, went to class, the professor didn't show up and people started leaving so I left as well. I got Hesse's Demian from the library and began reading it in the cafeteria. As I was reading, it occurred to me that it would be big of me to just accept what has happened and to try to move on. In that spirit I called her, and she came to meet me. The conversation started benignly (how are you, what’d you have for breakfast?), but then I asked her “Are you happy?” She asked what I meant. I repeated the question, emphasizing the word happy, and we took it from there. I couldn’t hear her words very well because my own thoughts and feelings were so loud. I was walking on a bed of nails, gauging how much her next phrase and sentence will hurt my already wounded ego. I thought intensely, asking myself before asking her anything whether I would like the answer. (The book’s epigraph kept ringing in my head: I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?)
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–92
All along I had no definite idea what I was trying to glean from her. I was just looking for an explanation (closure maybe). I told her I was trying to make myself feel better without making her feel worse. After I brought tears to my eyes we walked to her office, where I cried on her shoulder. I left her office and walked home, and I thought… I’m trying to hold onto every little piece of you I caught in my net, but I guess I’m just not strong enough. Just when I’m starting to take it all in, my muscles start to give out and you start to slip away like sand… For that brief moment you were entirely mine. You trusted me with everything, I was all you had. For that short lifespan I was your best and only friend. There were those before me and even those after me, but there wasn’t another like me. But for you every other is like me. In the end we’re all replaceable, dispensable. For that heartbeat you gave me every bone of your body, every sweat of every pore. Every tear you cried was in my presence, every word spoken for my ears. You made me feel like king of the world, and when I deposed myself from my own throne, you effortlessly found another king to replace me. Now I watch your thriving kingdom from a distance, standing behind the banyan tree in tattered clothes with no shoes to save my feet from pebbles strewn in my path. Now you tell him everything, as freely as you once told me. The faces changed. The bodies changed. Voices, odors, tendencies and temperaments all changed. But you remain the same, and what he means to you remains the same as what I meant to you. There was a time when I was in you, in your world. But just as easily as you took me in you threw me out. I asked for release and you kindly gave it. The web of my life was empty then and barren now. You were in it; I pushed you out, now it’s vacuous again. You’re never
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–93
searching and it’s always full; I’m always searching but I never find. You were like fine wine for my heart, a luxury that, however much I cherished, still didn’t quench my thirst for water. He drinks your precious wine and worships it too. While I don’t long for the taste of you (that would be fatally ironic), I still wonder how it tastes for you to be had by him, or simply any other than me. Isn’t the connoisseur as necessary and distinguished as the wine? Didn’t I, by ejecting you, discard you into oblivion, while raising myself to the level of puppet master? I am the grand puppet master of nothing but my own misery, and because the thought is too sharp to bear the sting, I divine intricate destinies for you and me and all that ever was, is, and will be. …Astonishing the perspective…so quickly after she was no longer mine! I threw myself back in time, and projected way ahead; I did anything at all to escape the moment that was present. I wrote… Rationalizing is the most ineffectual and impotent weapon against thoughts (sometimes so furious they inhibit action). Rationalize and analyze all you can, but you can never explain why certain thoughts keep recurring (and hence repeatedly torturing) your poor soul. Is it the soul that's tortured? I don't think so actually. The soul is much too pure to be tortured. But what do I know, who's never seen his soul, or ever heard even the faintest whisper to verify its existence. What I do think hurts is the heart (or perhaps a secondary soul within the heart?). The heart is a muscle, yet the heart that poets speak of is in essence a…a brain within the heart. Yes, it's a brain within the heart that hurts. Or simply, it's the brain that hurts. So there we are: the thoughts (which originate at the brain), cause pain which is received and interpreted by the brain. Therefore, the brain is the culprit. Destroy the brain and destroy all pain.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–94
A riverbank made special I stood on the riverbank. It was dirty, as I'd come to expect in India. Little insects crawled into my sandals and stung. I looked across the river, to the setting sun to my left, and I remembered other riverbanks and sunsets I had seen from them. I was so far from home but I wondered what was different about this one. Did anything make this one special, something I couldn't find at home? I stared into the sun as I thought this. I looked rightward and a boat was departing to cross river, two passengers being foreign tourists like myself. I wondered how badly they were getting fleeced for the journey across. In a jerky motion I again turned left, but this time I went beyond the setting sun, and my eyes fell on it, the reason this riverbank was special: looming high above green trees and red sandstone fortress stood the Taj Mahal. Thinking of it this way I marveled at it as at a toy– something desirable I longed to have (or in this case, see). The previous night I had gone inside the fortress and seen it close up. (Since I told them I was from Delhi and spoke Hindi, I paid Rs. 20 instead of the foreigner’s rate of Rs. 750.) I wasn't much moved, maybe because I expected something (I'm not sure what). This time, however, to see it in the context of all that surrounds it and the meaning and importance it brings to it all, I felt it genuinely worthwhile having come to see the monument of love. …Something desirable I longed to have… Riding the unceasing flight of time an out-ofcharacter surge of pathetic (it seems now) courage flew through me sometime after the breakup. We were broken up only a few days. I lay in bed reading a book when something brought to surface her still-fresh memory and I considered why I decided that we should no longer talk. I felt falsely superior; I don't need her, I told myself.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–95
“Speaking just to speak suits you but it doesn’t suit me. It’s an inborn personality thing, I realized a long time ago. Some people can just talk and talk, while others need to be more careful about what they say, and when.” “What do you mean?” I turned to her in frustration stemming from ambiguity about my own motives. “I mean I can’t be your friend. I can’t talk to you like a friend, and even if I could we have nothing to talk about.” “Why not?” I had to think about how to put this, but I could no longer take the time I was used to doing with her in our private moments. “Because I don’t trust what comes out of your mouth anymore; you talk just to talk sometimes–and I understand, that’s how you are and you need to do that. But I weigh words–especially my own–very heavily. You say so many things, I'll never do this, I’ll never do that…and the next day you go and do just that, like you never said anything. You didn’t make any vows or promises, fine, but to me it’s very bothersome to have words thrown out like that.” “What have I said or done like that?” I was frustrated trying to explain myself (and honestly surprised that she stuck around to raise an argument). I generalized: “I don’t know, it’s just…you have all these people in your life–girl friends especially–that you call your friends, yet half the time you’re complaining to me about how much you hate them or how annoying they are or crap like that… I just…I can’t take what you say seriously after you’ve said so much that you just take back or toss aside and forget. I’ll lose my mind trying to understand you if I don't render all your words uniformly meaningless.”
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–96
…Lying in bed that night with her thought in tow, I contrasted myself to her in a most lyrical way: I lead a simple life on the exterior. Very simple. Few tasks, few people, few errands and routines. I don’t envy you your complications, because mine are much more perverse, involved, intricate, and moving. If yours are the latest and greatest skyscrapers, mine is the rare Taj Mahal: beyond eccentric in its design and execution, extravagantly adorned in marble and verses of the Quran. It’s another matter I don’t perform the task of my creation as well as you, because my purpose is really quite different. Mine is not a means to an end, like yours… The Taj is quiet and the world is loud… Mine’s an end in itself because I am. My creator lavished me with motherly love and attention, but the world doesn’t need me. I serve no use other than to show what’s useful by absence–by highlighting everything I’m not. I’m a showpiece for all to see and admire from a distance, and then move on with their daily lives. You’re among them, moving about seemingly effortlessly in your outwardly complex activities. So you realize, armed with this beautiful self-aggrandizing picture, how I can afford to not be concerned with the circumferential busy-ness of your life. The closer I get to your core the sparser you become, but for me it’s quite the opposite. All the weight’s concentrated near the center, so I spin faster–much faster. It’s simple physics.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–97
Reunion We met only once again after ending, in my dreams (there were other dreams, but none as real as this)… I knew you a long time ago… It had been at least a year and a half since we broke up. Where did the time go? What was I thinking about in all the idle moments of those years if not about you? I can't imagine any other thoughts now… Life happened and we parted, but still you remained with me. At the end of my wits about you, I decided to effect a reunion. You were always the homely type, so I guessed you wouldn’t have strayed far from home even after all these years. Family meant more to you than anything else–even me–back then. It’s rare that values like that change after a certain age unless catastrophe strikes. After searching for you the first image I came across was one of you looking down into the camera from above, smiling that smile. You weren’t stunning, but only God and the ones you’ve been with since me know there’s something irresistibly infectious in you. I wouldn’t call it personality or charm because it’s more than those concepts. I’m even tempted to say it’s who you are in spite of you. Back then that smile was the harbinger of intense love and unbridled passion. Now, whenever I picture it, it sets off a firecracker of memories where each little spark is a wish that I’d acted differently. It’s not that you were a constant angel and not culpable, but it’s me–not you–writing now; me and not you who still occasionally dreams and relives the past. Through my powers I arrange to meet you. Fate, unfortunately, is about as generous with me now as it was back then, in terms of you. I send you a note in the morning on the day we’re to meet hoping to break the ice that’s accumulated over the years. Who would have known this note would be the unraveling of this episode.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–98
You come. It’s cold outside and there’s snow on the ground. We meet at the bus/train station. Many hours of mental preparation have gone into this moment from my end. First of all I had to drive several hours to get to where you are and I used to be. When I get there, I debate whether to take the train to meet you or whether to drive and risk getting stuck in traffic. My character doesn’t betray me, and in a high flight of fancy I weigh the pros and cons of both options: Train: I can listen to music and keep myself distracted. I’ll be fairly certain to arrive on time. The downside is that we won’t be able to go anywhere if we desire to. Car: I’ll be driving which I like to do, but I might get stuck in traffic. But–and this is where my imagination always carries me away–what if we find something that wasn’t lost even after all these years? What if we create a moment and need a space to see it through? We’ll have the backseat of my car. Even if it’s not the same car I had then that we were in last time, at least the dimensions and layout are reasonably similar. Even if I’ve aged and you haven’t, the smells of our bodies are what they used to be. I decide to drive to meet you. I arrive before you do, as was always the case. It’s a little after six but it’s pitch black. We’re to meet outside, in the cold. It’s an ugly place, the train station. Nothing about it pleases the eye or heart, and as I wait in the car I wonder how you, being so beautiful, acquiesce to travel through here every day. Doesn’t it dampen your day to pass through something so detestable? I put myself in your shoes as you go to work in the morning, and I feel less pretty going through this train station. The throngs of people are annoying to me, and I wish for beauty and for space.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–99
I step outside the car and breathe in the cold air. I see someone I think is you walking down a ramp. I want to run to you to make sure you don’t find ice and end up falling. Thankfully you make it down without incident. I haven’t seen you in years. You look stunning. Short straight hair just covering your neck. You never had this look before. In the height of winter you’re wearing a black top that reveals your shoulders. In two separate centers of my body I feel opposite emotions. Again I think you look stunning, but I’m also stunned as to what possessed you to dress so incompletely for this unforgiving cold. Maybe you did it for me. I like that thought and I keep it in the forefront of my mind. I never saw you like this before. You look like a woman. It’s a man’s world but up till the point of violence it’s a woman who controls a thousand men. Every man would want you right now. You’ve changed so much but still you’re the same in your irresistibly infectious something. I can’t put a name on it. But as I walk toward you, as I see that smile that I forgot not for a second, I lose all my air and my feet slow to a crawl. I recall your reply to my icebreaker from earlier in the day. The note I received back said: Me and Sabian are teaching at Kasiming High School and doing just fiberly… (You wrote an entire letter but I stopped reading at this point.) Now I don’t pick apart the grammar the way I did when I read it. (First of all, it’s Sabian and I. And fiberly? Is that even a word?) The note crushed me with its unassumingness as soon as I read it. I focused on what couldn’t hurt me in order to remain standing. Your grammar is elementary. How can you be teaching others? What kind of name is Sabian?
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–100
I find Kasiming High School. To deepen the theme of my voluntary ruin, the place where you and Sabian spend every day together is less of a building and more of a glorious castle. I picture with longing the castles we visited in. But now, with my feet dragging the rest of me along toward you, I know it’s lost. I probably shouldn’t have driven. We both might as well turn around and pretend this night didn’t happen; this cold night in this ugly place, where we risk falling with every step because it’s so dark and nature’s strewn ice everywhere.
Sabian found my goldmine and decided to build a house on it.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–101
Mrs. York Darjeeling was intensely foggy throughout my 3-day stay there, so much so that I had to forego the popular 4:30 AM trip to Tiger Hill to watch the sun rise over Kanchenjunga (something I was really looking forward to). In fact I didn’t even want to take the chance and bother getting up so early because I was certain that I wouldn’t get to see anything if I did go. E—, however, was quite excited to go despite the persistent fog. I met E— in Sikkim where we took jeep tours of Yumthang Valley and Tsongo Lake together. (We both happened to be at the same travel agency at the same time, looking to travel to the same places. Since there were no other travelers to split costs with, we decided we could at least split with each other.) I also traveled to and toured Darjeeling with him. We were staying at the same hotel so on two consecutive nights we decided we would wake up at 3:30, check the sky from the window, and decide if we want to get dressed and ready and hike down to the taxi stand, which was a 15-minute walk from the hotel. I think we both knew we wouldn’t end up going, but so as to not seem unenthusiastic to the other we took this step and faithfully woke up early in the morning. He came to my room and knocked. I opened the door, silently let him in, and we stood at the window looking outside. We laughed after a pause of silence while we stared out because we couldn’t see anything but fog in the distance. Then he left to go back to his room and I went back to sleep. We took a pre-paid jeep from Gangtok to Darjeeling. I don't remember how long it took but I couldn't fall asleep even for a second on the whole ride, because it was bad road and we made frequent stops. E— and I were in the backseat, along with a young boy who I learned was returning to his village near Darjeeling after working in a factory in Punjab for a few months. (He asked me to top up minutes on his pre-paid cell phone but since the instructions were in
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Pranshu Arya–102
Bengali I couldn't help him.) Every place he stopped the driver knew someone, and twice he offered his acquaintances rides part of the way to their destination at the expense of our comfort, because we had to cram 4 to a seat for that little while, leaving no moving space whatsoever. No one wanted to sit in the two facing chairs at the very back of the jeep, so at one such stop I got out and moved there, where it was more bumpy but less interrupted at least. E— and I were the only foreigners in the jeep. The others were a group of two old women with an old man, and a young couple with a babe-in-arms who sat all the way up front. When the Sikkim/West Bengal border arrived we had to “check out” of the state. E— looked at me to say let’s go, but I said “I didn’t get a permit coming in. I passed off as Indian, so I’m good.” He was shocked but laughed, and went to get his passport stamped. When he returned we started discussing the pros and cons of what I had done. There really were no pros, I told him. It was just easier. If they had asked me to get off the bus when I had come in and get a permit I would have, but since I speak Hindi and answered them in it and told them I’m from Delhi, they didn’t say anything. They do suspect me, I told them, because of my clothes and overall look, but as soon as I speak Hindi to them they’re placated. “But what if something happens?” he asked. E— was a friendly but quiet and cautious man in his forties. “I considered that too, but whatever.” I made a dismissive motion with my hand and eyes. I hadn’t really worried about it too much. “It could work in your favor if you were a criminal and going somewhere for illegal activities, but since you’re not a criminal, it can actually work against you.” “How’s that?” I asked.
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Pranshu Arya–103
He thought about it for a second. I hadn’t realized till then that my friend kept quite an imagination on him. “Well suppose something happens at a hotel you’re staying at, in Darjeeling suppose. Even though you just arrived there today, they could start looking at you for it if it happened in the past couple of days. You have no proof on your passport to show them that you were in Gangtok like you say you were.” “I didn’t consider that buddy.” I spoke lightly, because the threat and the likelihood didn’t seem at all real. “Or just in general, suppose something happens on a larger scale and they start questioning everyone who was present. When they get to you they’ll see that you’re traveling suspiciously, avoiding getting permits like a legitimate person. That could get unnecessary suspicion thrown your way.” I supposed he was right, but Sikkim was the last place I traveled to that required a special permit, so there was nothing I could do to better my position going forward. We stopped talking after that. E— dozed off for a while and I took some pictures from the open back of the jeep. Once we arrived in Darjeeling around 3 we found a taxi to take us to our hotel and we both settled into our rooms. It rained all day on our second day in Darjeeling, but that didn’t keep E— and me from venturing out and exploring the city. We visited popular tourist spots like the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute and the Bengal Natural History Museum, and a ruined tea estate. In the morning it was just drizzle but by afternoon it got pretty heavy. After lunch E— decided to head back to the hotel to rest and catch up on e-mails and some reading. I didn't want to go back just yet so I caught the early evening show (a remake of a Hollywood flick) at the Inox movie theatre. When it was done and I was walking back (a steep long uphill walk), I crossed paths
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–104
with a British family with an elderly member in a wheelchair. It looked like the son was pushing his mother or mother-in-law while his wife held their young child's hand. The old lady was lively, and they seemed a happy family the way they were talking and laughing as they made their way down toward Hill Cart Rd. The sight spawned in my mind the story below.
On a cold summer morning in the hills of Darjeeling, Mrs. York sat motionless facing the mirror. She was wrapped in a blanket so only her face was out of cover. Her wheelchair stood three-and-a-half feet from the wall, far enough so she could see clearly her face, and close enough so the sun coming in from directly behind her didn’t obscure her vision. An orderly had washed her and dressed her before seating her there. Mrs. York’s limbs did not move. She hadn’t moved on her own in years. She could see and hear but not speak. Sadly only she knew her limited capability because she couldn’t even blink her eyelids to communicate it. Hers was the best room in the establishment, high above the windy roads of the city. Her own furniture decorated it and made even such a large room cozy and inviting. Ironically she had never used any of it besides her bed and the wheelchair she was sitting in, which belonged to the establishment. Mrs. York knew the view in the mirror by heart. She knew what stood behind her and where. If her body was obstinately asleep, her mind was placidly awake. Something today was glaringly wrong. This morning she was sad and humiliated and particularly low upon herself. To escape the sight of what lay before her eyes she turned to her jewelry box of memories. Heavy black eyeliner smeared above eyelids. She remembered when, as a young girl of 15 she had first worn makeup. She was with her closest friend in her room. (She tried but
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couldn’t recall her best friend’s name.) Both girls had stolen some supplies from their mothers’ collections and were now taking turns applying it on each other. They giggled and laughed and even screamed out of delight. They talked of society and boys and their budding bodies and the desires newly arising in them. They covered their mouths every time they heard footsteps, fearing Mother would discover them and scold them. Mrs. York remembered her mother and what a fine lady she had been, so loving and caring but also upright in her duties as a wife and mother. She particularly adored her habit of replacing fresh flowers each morning in all the occupied rooms of the house. The flower vase that stood on her dresser that day long ago was the same one now holding rhododendrons on a table under the window behind her. She looked at it in the mirror but soon her sight shifted straight in front of her. Pink blush on one cheek and sky blue on the other. Mrs. York thought it a fine job in its own right, but that didn’t take away the pain. As a newlywed bride she had been glamorous and stunningly beautiful. All her husband’s friends openly jested with him, saying he got much more than he deserved. They had traveled extensively, to Paris, Rome, and finally to India where they chose to settle. So many sunsets they had watched together go down in pink, so many sunrises in each other’s arms painting the sky blue. He had loved her and she had loved him, she thought, not in any special way, but a way so ordinary and sincere that it was very special. She considered proudly that infidelity had never shown its ugly face throughout their 30-year union, right up till George’s untimely death. She thought fondly of the bed she couldn’t turn her head sideways to look at. George had had it imported from Italy, gone to great length to ensure the massive fixture made it thousands of miles across rough seas without a single scratch on the pristine oak. He had always leaned toward the extravagant, and she had let him indulge, keeping an almost motherly watch over his shoulder as he did.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–106
Long whiskers drew her along their length, taking her to her son Lloyd. She recalled the day when, at the age of five, he brought home a stray cat. He was clever and went to his father, who he knew was more likely than mother, the voice of reason, to let him keep the adorable orphaned feline. How many promises he had agreed to with such glowing enthusiasm! To always eat his vegetables, to always brush his teeth, to always obey mother and father… The day of Lloyd’s birth had been one of divine labor. Her mind had seamlessly blocked out all pain, so elated was she to be delivering her first child. Then, holding his fragile form to her breast, with eyes dropping joyful tears on his tiny skull, she had gently expressed to her husband, who stood over her with an arm around her, her wish to name their baby boy after her maternal grandfather, Lloyd Wordsworth, distinguished merchant of Oxford. (Some of the happiest days of her childhood were the summers in Oxford. She sat with her grandfather at his shop and, when he wasn’t with customer, he would tell her many stories–tales of fiction, of himself and grandmother, and of his days in the forces. She reckons she was much too little to understand, but to sit in her grandfather’s lap and fall asleep on his chest was the greatest bliss. Strangely when she awoke, she’d find herself tucked securely in her bed, voices of grandfather and grandmother audible but not comprehensible wafting up from downstairs.) Of course her simple desire was fulfilled. They had given their only child everything he desired. They had loved him to no end and everything was well until George’s death, after which she noticed her son pulling away from her. He supported her through their loss, but not with the fragile heart a son has for his mother. She could only suppose he held her largely responsible for his father’s demise, for not forcibly taking him away from India after he contracted malaria. Only she knew what a bind she had been in– her husband’s dying and insistent desire to remain here alone with his wife and son, and her own
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–107
selfish one to take him to England for better care. She couldn’t break his heart and not grant the dying man his last wish, and that’s what she considered had alienated her from Lloyd. He rarely visited her, living in England and having a prosperous law practice to tend to. The last time he came he brought her a necklace with a silver chain holding a compact sparkling diamond. She remembered how cold his hands were as he bent over her to set it, and the kiss on her cheek, how sad and cold it had been! Still, the necklace never came off for it kept her child close to her aging heart. Smaller, thinner whiskers. Her mind stayed with Lloyd as she thought about the grandchildren she’d been deprived the pleasure of spoiling. Lloyd had brought them when he last came (how many years ago had that been?) but they were too young and their stay too short for them to know their grandmother. Most of all she was forgetting the condition she was in, non-ambulatory and mute. Her mind projected forward and she wondered whether they will have any memories or stories from their father about their grandparents. Her heart suddenly sank as she remembered George. He hadn’t even gotten to see their faces. She would soon join him and describe them to him. As her journey in thought slowly progressed through generations, the sun had taken on a harsher brighter color. Her mood lifted slightly as she appreciated having lived to see another day. She took her eyes inward and thanked her God and even smiled within upon imagining the joy they had derived out of the horror she found facing her in the mirror this morning. The fact was the establishment staff had played an evil trick on Mrs. York. While she was sleeping they had, albeit quite skillfully, played makeup artists and gone to work on her face: blush on her cheeks, cat-like whiskers around her mouth, many in number and various in thickness and length. The eyeliner was the only artifact not masterfully applied.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–108
They had thought she wouldn’t notice, being the statue she is to them. It’s not their fault they couldn’t see life through or in her eyes, loving and forgiving toward everyone and everything.
Earlier in the day, at the tea estate I mentioned before, something happened that left a discouraging picture of the Indian worker on the forefront of my mind (which was in my consideration as I crafted the ending of this story). We couldn’t see Tiger Hill, but we figured we should at least visit a tea estate–Darjeeling being as well known for tea as it is. After some trouble and a lot of asking around, E— and I managed to find one we could visit. It was just outside the city, about a 15-minute walk. The estate lay below the road, so upon arriving we turned off the sidewalk into the gravel path and began descending. Rich green tea leaves surrounded us and a sharp fog hung over our heads. We were walking when a loud voice from below said "Hello!" E— stopped so I stopped. He said there were two men below and they were motioning for us to stay where we were. Following him I stayed put (otherwise I would have kept walking). In a few minutes, while I changed the batteries in my camera, they arrived to where we stood. They were two men of average height, one slightly stocky and one slim. The former looked of Tibetan descent and the latter Bengali. They wore t-shirts and trousers and the stocky man held onto an umbrella. They approached us, smilingly, and the stocky one in a blue polo shirt asked us where we're from. E— said he's Italian, and in my turn I said Indian. I didn't realize till later, after my companion pointed it out, that their words were slurring and they were most likely drunk.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–109
Not understanding what they were saying E— moved away, leaving me alone in their line of fire. They proceeded to ask me where in India I'm from, what my religion is, and what my caste is. I told them I'm from Delhi and Hindu and I don't know my caste. They asked, "Are you Punjabi, from UP, Gujarati…" I pretended not to understand but when they persisted and asked repeatedly I said I'm from UP just to shut them up and get them off my back. I tried asking them why they're asking (in English) but they didn't comprehend. Thinking maybe they'll understand Hindi I switched over. They didn't understand my question, or if they did they didn't care to respond. Instead, on learning I spoke Hindi, they set off on an abusive tirade. The Bengali one spoke first, initially politely. He said something like (in poor Hindi), "We wanted to make introduction…introduction, you know?" I nodded in agreement. He continued, "That's problem with Indians…we all Indians…want to make introduction"–at this point the other man turned to E—, still standing a few steps away, and emphasized "introduction" with large eyes. His words were slurred and I had to repeat them for my friend to understand. I don't recall who spoke next but again they addressed me: "We want to make introduction…you Indians so rude." Then at some point, the stocky man, with an angry face in an angry voice said, "You wear sunglasses and hat and you think you foreigner?" (It was rainy and foggy but still bright, so I wore sunglasses). The whole time we were talking I was aware that, being drunk as they were (I knew by that point) and the nature of their questions being personal and potentially contentious, they could resort to violence if I spoke in anger. The chances were slim but not none. I stayed put and, to try to clear the air, said "I didn't know who was asking and why, that's why I didn't say anything." I managed to get out of them that they were workers on the estate. There was anger in their drunken faces so eventually I stepped away
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–110
and we walked off. They kept repeating "introduction" and soon walked away as well, in the other direction toward the road. What came out of this encounter, I wondered later. Who was right and who was wrong? Should I not have been suspicious of strangers who didn't identify themselves and asked fanatical questions? (Who asks about caste and religion, I thought, first thing off the bat unless their behavior and actions will be predicated on the response?) Should they have known that such suspicion is the norm outside their little world? Sadly, one common thread emerged in my mind that ran three ways: a bad image of India and Indians through them for me, through me for them, and through the whole event for my foreign friend.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–111
The movies "Which movie did you see in Darjeeling?" "Come on, you know I can't tell you that." "What, why not?" "Because if I tell you here the producers will sue me for picking on them and their movie." "Alright, then what are you going to say?" "I'm just going to present an open letter to the Indian film industry."
Dear Indian film-makers: Here’s your problem: you don’t do your homework. Where in New York City will you find a big yellow taxi with a steering-mounted manual gearbox? (I know some Fiat taxis in Bombay have them, but a Crown Victoria? Come on.) An American hospital where the stretcher is lazily being pushed through the ER corridor by a nurse and the attending doctor on one side and two Indian peons on the other? You want to get a point across through situations that are real, but you don’t take the trouble to find out exactly what the real picture is, that you can’t drive 100 mph through Manhattan, and even if you manage to somehow, your chances of making it out without getting arrested after being chased by an entire fleet of cop cars are entirely zero, especially when, while driving like this you pass by a cop on the sidewalk enjoying his mid-morning donut. Directors of the fantastical have free reign over what to show and how to show it, but if you’re depicting reality it is your fundamental imperative to show what’s actually real to remain credible with your viewers (that would be me). If you’re going to show NASCAR, at least get to
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know NASCAR; study an ER environment instead of imagining it or carelessly copying what those before you have shown, in a different era of film-making when such scenes were avantgarde and in the realm of the fantastical, and hence spared from this burden of fidelity to the real. My two cents to you, my dear Indian film-makers: if you’re not able to afford the legwork required to faithfully show modern reality, or you’re just unwilling to do it, stick to the emotions and drama you do know and leave the other reality to big-budget Hollywood. Sincerely, Nameless narrator.
"I know which movie you're talking about." "Fuck. Are they going to sue me now? "Stop being such a pussy. Say what you want to say and move on." "Alright, sounds to me like you're taking responsibility for whatever happens." After a brief pause I added, "And you know, yesterday in that movie I was watching on your computer, this super-talented Indian hero was single-handedly beating up five or six wellbuilt gundaas (bad guys) in Times Square dressed up as a woman in a wig and high heels. And in one of the shots, as he was punching the gundaa into the ground, I noticed a cop car on the street in the background. The cop was standing there holding the crowd back so they could shoot the scene."
"Ever notice how movie characters, more often than not, have trinkets and carry emotional baggage? Shoeboxes of letters and photos, people from their past that they never really expound on and you’re left wondering at the end what their purpose was in the storyline.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–113
"Some have journals made of rich brown leather in which they carry filled papers, loose papers, receipts and phone numbers, business cards. They have old letters, recent letters, unopened letters, returned letters. It’s all very romantic because it conveys a notion of a life lived deeply, of an impression made on the earth that will last a second longer than the other guy who doesn’t carry such effects. "I wonder, what’s their purpose? Are these features supposed to make them more relatable to the audience? Sure, I have trinkets, but I hardly ever look at them. Movie characters seem to have all their thoughts, all their good stuff in one convenient place. I on the other hand have some stuff in one journal, some in another, some on the computer, and some God knows where. Where’s the romance of nostalgia in my reality? If I’m really feeling nostalgic one day and want to look back, chances are I won’t be able to find what I’m looking for because everything’s so scattered!" "Can you do better?" “At organizing my stuff? No, I’ve tried–” “No smartass, at making movies.” “No, no way. I can't even take photographs. I took so many while I was traveling, but they just don't have that something that people-who-love-and-know-photography's pictures have. I got lucky sometimes and got a really good exposure, but to do it consistently requires a special talent, and that's not true just with photography. Life's like that, everyone has their inborn talent, don't you think?" "I suppose you're right. Otherwise how could the same people consistently give such good work, whether movies photos music or books?"
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–114
“I used to be ambivalent toward one-hit wonders, thinking they got lucky or maybe someone pushed them and something came out, like burping a child or something. Obviously they weren’t talented enough to do something again. But lately I’ve become of the view that it’s the work that matters more than its creator, so, in that context, why look down on them or call them flukes? They did what they had to do I guess, they contributed whatever they could, even if it was accidental.” Then I asked him in earnest, "What has a better chance for success, being disciplined or being gifted?" "Well, statistically I think I can say with confidence that those who work hard achieve success more often than those who don't. For those who're naturally gifted but not hard-working, it takes an unusual–and rare–synchronicity of events to achieve the circumstances that let their talents yield fruit." “I wish I could capture every sway of the hand in words.” “Where did that come from?” “I don’t know. It’s just a thought and a desire. Osho–you know Osho?–says every art form is born out of meditation.” “Do you consider yourself an artist?” “That’s another thing. People have debates over what’s art. You throw some paint on the wall and because you have a name from before from somewhere else it’s called art. If I did the same thing it’d be considered nonsense. I guess it’s the same with artist. This world of art doesn’t appear to work on formal and articulated definitions of labels. It’s only after an inner confidence and even stubbornness to call yourself an artist–and the acceptance of your art–that the community-at-large accepts you as one, and you go from there.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–115
“Words don’t seem intrinsic to man. I mean, when we’re born we have our five senses. In terms of art I would say we’re innately predisposed to appreciating and creating pictures (sight), music (sound), and the fragrant and the culinary (smell and taste). And then there’s touch also, which has its own other quality.” It wasn’t my intention to give a thorough dissertation on my interpretation of art and its perception. I was only saying that words don’t have a manifest sensory receptor. “Language develops later on (which isn’t to say it’s any less rudimentary than the other media) so to me it just isn’t intuitive how it becomes a natural way of thinking and being. I feel half complete in the other arts: able to appreciate art and music but not capable of contributing anything original. Words, however, are a whole another mode for me. I function entirely in their space, and I don’t know how to state that any less abstractly. “Either way,” I concluded, “the burden of creativity is the most beautiful burden anyone will ever carry.” “Artists are powerful though,” he said. “Look at their influence in our world, everywhere around us. Especially writers and film-makers; they create characters and animate them too. It’s like creating human beings and doing whatever you want with them.” “I thought about that before. It’s a bit like playing God. Actually, some time ago I realized that a writer is a god. A writer kills; he breeds, he fucks; he brings together, he separates; he tortures, rapes, saves, rescues, salvages, burns, destroys… A writer creates destinies much like the one God. A writer is, ultimately, an egomaniac, taking the fate of as many as he dares and has the talent for into those hands that he trusts and adores so much. He plays with them, human beings, animals, children, places and things…worlds and universes. “The artist though…he leads an altogether different kind of life.”
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–116
“How so?” When I didn’t speak right away he looked at me questioningly, saying “Well?” with his eyes. When he didn’t relent I finally said: “It’s going to sound condescending or even contemptuous, but some lives just seem…uncomfortably self-contained. Like a big ball rolling down a steep road, and that's all there is to it.” “I have no idea what you mean by that.” “Imagine a prostitute who has a young son. She work nights and even days and earns money just to sustain herself–so she can do the same thing again tomorrow–and her son–for whom she'll do the same thing again tomorrow. There is no bigger reason, no greater purpose to her existence. That's what I mean by it being self-contained–and seemingly worthlessly so– because she's living just to not be dead; there's no more to her life than that. There's nothing more to life than that in reality or…what’s even worse…in her perception.” “And how is it for the artist?” he asked. “Isn't that an uncomfortable thought though? Or say she's not a prostitute. Say it's a single–or married, doesn't matter–parent like millions with a respectable job. He has a regular salary with a kid or two and a mortgage. It's the same story. His world is boring to begin with, and to make it worse it's self-contained, which makes it even more boring because it’s so predictable. How does he break out of that big ball to explore some other existence? He can't– not without rupturing something. He’s stuck… But I admire their–both John Q’s and the prostitute’s–will for going on living. This is my own artistic prejudice speaking, making their wonderfully wholesome life into some sad existence that I cannot envision for myself. “It's only the artist's life, which exists primarily in possibility, that's not a big ball rolling down a steep road. It's a completely opposite life for them, in that possibilities actualize
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haphazardly for the other kind–with them generally unaware of the significant number of alternatives to every little happening in their lives–in between which they just keep on rolling. The artist, however, lives for the possibilities; he lives in possibilities. His existence is to contemplate all that's possible. So in that sense his life has to live itself inside his head, because not all possibilities can possibly actualize into reality. “The artist is Schrodinger's wave equation humanized, and his life as seen from outside is its classical reality counterpart–a collection of finite actualizations from an infinity of possibilities that only he's aware of.” I lost him with the physics reference, but, not to be outdone, he astonished me with his remark. He shifted in the chair as if about to get up and said: “One of the tallest truths in life is that we take credit for things we had nothing to do with: beauty, talent, and luck.”
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Pranshu Arya–118
Acknowledgment "Aren't you going to acknowledge anyone in your book?" I thought about it for a while before speaking. "There are plenty of people I want to acknowledge, but then if I leave someone out they'll get mad that I mentioned some other person and left them out." "That's a lame excuse." "Alright, since I have to acknowledge someone, I'd rather do it for someone who helped me in a most understated and generous way. When I was young, in the 5th grade I think, we had to write a speech and deliver it in front of the class. I was a big astronomy buff back then. In fact I used to always have huge library fines because I'd take out all these books on astronomy and the solar system and never return them on time. They actually banned me from the library and my parents refused to let me use their cards. "But anyway, since I was so interested in astronomy, I chose to write about the solar system, our solar system. I talked about the Sun and each of the planets. I have no clue how long the speech was supposed to be, but in the 3-4 minute range sounds about right. It sounds like nothing now but I guess back then it was a lot of time to stand in front of the class and read something out loud that you were supposed to have memorized. You could have cue cards to help you but the teacher really emphasized that the majority of your time should be spent looking at your audience, not at your cards. "I wasn't at all creative in what I wrote. I basically regurgitated facts I had learned from books and encyclopedias. Somehow though, I won the class competition. I can't remember a single topic from the rest of the class, but I was genuinely shocked that I won. I even remember the congratulations I got from the hottest girl in the class, Samantha. At recess, standing under
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the tree directly across the concrete yard from the building door, she said to me something like, 'What would you say if I told you your speech was the best in the whole class?'" He interjected: "Hottest girl, in the 5th grade? That's a bit creepy." "Well for a 5th grader, which I was back then, 5th grade girls were hot." "How did you respond?" "Something cheesy like, 'Then I'd be grateful to you from the bottom of my heart.' I wasn't prepared for the genuine note of appreciation from the prettiest girl I knew. I can still remember her face and what she was wearing–a blue sweater and a blue skirt, and the gorgeous smile on her face when she spoke to me. I was surprised I managed to mumble something coherent at all. "So after I won the class competition naturally I was selected to represent my class in the grade-level competition in the gymnasium to be held the following week. My parents knew nothing about my little accomplishment, they didn’t' really care back then. I didn't really want to compete or say my speech anymore, because even if I won, it just meant competing further and higher up. I wasn't interested, so naturally I took the affair lightly and practiced maybe once or twice in that week's time. I was nervous on the morning of the speech. I remember staring at the building as I got out of my mom's car and thinking that I'm going to be speaking in front of everyone in there in a little while. "Before I could speak though, I had a problem to fix. It was pointed out to me that I was pronouncing my vs wrong. My vs sounded like ws, so Venus came out sounding like Wenus. I couldn't go in front of the whole school with that! In front of the class was bad enough–although at that point I wasn’t even aware of the problem. That's when my friend Brian, the guy I want to say thanks to here, came to my rescue.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–120
"We stood in front of the chalkboard. It was still before class so it was me him and a few other students in the classroom. He wrote Venus in big letters on the board (as if that would help me pronounce it properly) and then he went to work: 'Vvvvvveeeenus.' 'Wwwweeenus.' 'No, try again. Vvvvvveeeenus.' 'Wwwweeenus.' 'No, look at my mouth. Vvvvvveeee. See how my teeth sit on my lower lip, like that?' 'Yeah.' 'Vvvvvveeeenus.' 'Vvvvvv' I said it right! 'Vvvvvveeeenus!' 'Vvvvvveeeenus.' 'Vvvvvveeeenus.' Needless to say I was ecstatic and relieved, and Brian seemed proud and relieved also. I thanked him. I don't remember exactly how but I thanked him. It was uncomfortable saying genuine thanks back then. I practiced for a while before I had it comfortably at my command, and went off to do my thing when time came." "Why couldn't you say thanks? What's so hard about that?" "Yeah, I'm sure you went up to your friends in 5th grade all the time and said 'Thanks buddy' and shook their hand and patted them on the shoulder or something. You know how it is with guys in those years of growing up. I don't remember exactly but it’s like a no-man's land when you're probably just starting to develop mature feelings. You can say thanks to those older than you because there's a safe distance there, and I guess it's the same with girls to an extent, but with other guys you're not exactly rewarded for being sensitive and thoughtful."
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–121
"How'd the speech go?" "Huh?" "The speech, you know, in front of the whole school?" "Oh, yeah. I did alright, but not great. I came in 4th I think, out of how many I forget–but it was definitely more than four."
“You realize that acknowledgment has nothing to do with the rest of the book.” I thought about it. “Sure it does–indirectly, but it does. And that’s not even what’s important. I just wanted to say thanks to someone who helped me in a most unobvious way. Do you realize how important a lesson it is that Brian taught me that one morning, in a matter of minutes? I would’ve had an entirely different school life if it hadn’t been for that. “But if you’re looking for something that you’d consider more relevant, let me acknowledge all my former girlfriends, my experiences with whom gave me much of the insight into myself that I walk around with today, for better or worse…better I think.” We were having cold beer on another occasion. There was a light breeze but it was still hot as hell. It was evening time, as usual for our get-togethers. The lady next door was taking down the clothes she’d put up to dry in the morning. Across the street the kids played on the roof again, but their attractive older sister wasn’t there this time. There wasn’t a moment of relief to be had from the blaring of horns from the main road behind us. The day of my flight out of Delhi (to Calcutta) was getting closer, and truthfully I wasn't feeling sad or even close to it. “Why don’t we fly a kite?” I asked him. “I gave that up a long time ago.”
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–122
I looked strangely at him. “You say that like you gave up smoking or drinking or something, something that’s bad for you.” Unaffected he said, “Nah, I fell from up there many years ago when I was doing it once. I was trying to cut another guy’s kite and I wasn’t looking where my feet were.” He pointed to the neighbor’s roof with his left hand, beer bottle in hand. It was approximately 12 feet high. We both sat silently for a while after that. "Oh, and before I forget," I spoke with a start, "let me gratefully and formally acknowledge you, my friend, for figuring so prominently in my book. Were it not for my ability to portray you however I wanted and speak through you, half my ideas would have gotten shelved."
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–123
How a friendship came to end I felt a growing tension with my friend, perhaps due to some misunderstandings both of us didn’t feel up to resolving. It only became like that, thankfully, near the end of my stay in Delhi. Sometimes I felt guilty because even though he spoke openly with me initially and revealed much of himself, I never bothered to reciprocate. We didn't talk at all toward the end except to exchange pleasantries. The only hitch was that he had to make the arrangements for me to leave. [Not that we were arguing, but it’s interesting and funny when two people are arguing and they stop talking after a point and realize it’s best for them to go separate ways. What’s funny is that they then start talking like normal people as the person leaving tries to make travel arrangements. The person who’s not leaving willingly and (ostensibly) politely offers his knowledge toward helping the other person.] When I did leave, it was quick and informal. We didn't say call me or e-mail me or keep in touch or any of that. A simple take care and I was off. Speaking of misunderstandings, though, one morning I just thought of how minor ones can sometimes have major consequences and even rupture relationships. The story below is inspired by a brief exchange I witnessed between my friend and a business guest of his visiting the store (while I stood by and watched the city slowly wake up to another morning).
“Two rupees.” “How so?” “I sent P— two nights ago to fetch a bottle of soda two nights ago. I gave him ten rupees and he didn’t give me the change.”
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–124
They laughed about it. They did business to the tune of hundreds, some days thousands, of rupees on a daily basis; to talk about two rupees for so many seconds was nothing if not amusing and ridiculous. I watched him come to my friend’s store every day. Normally he came just before 10 AM, when he knew the chaiwalla made his rounds of all the stores in the line. He would drink tea with the store employees (my friend doesn’t drink tea) and chat with my friend and me. He was a natural born talker. A low-on-testosterone squeaky-voiced and lacking-of-facial-hair specimen of 20 years, he was to get married in 2 months. I listened to him intently every day that I saw him, in awe of how someone so young could talk so fast and respond even faster to anything you said to him. I learned much from him, most of all the side of the Hindi language I hadn’t known till I came to India this time around: the vulgar side. Every other word from his mouth was “sister-fucker” and “pussy” and the like. I hadn’t been exposed to these words before; I had often wondered what the Hindi equivalent of “motherfucker” and “pussy” were but had never found out. (I wasn’t even sure if Hindi had such vulgar words in her vocabulary.) After all, there wasn’t anyone I spoke Hindi with except family members. In my turn I imparted on him some basic knowledge of English. It wasn’t deliberate; I wasn’t trying to teach him English. What would happen is that he would come and my notebook and the book I was reading at the moment would be left sitting on the desk, or the day’s newspaper would be sitting around. He’d start to read slowly out loud, making a spectacle of himself and amusing us.
I’ll digress briefly to relate one event that endeared me to him: One morning he came to the store. I was reading a book I had purchased at the annual Delhi Book Fair a few days earlier, Haruki Murakami’s collection of short stories Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. When he came I
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–125
put the book down and we started talking, my friend, him, and me. I was looking away somewhere when I heard broken English in a thick Indian accent. He had picked up my book and started reading random words from random pages of it. This went on for a couple of minutes and then, out of exhaustion, he put the book down. I asked him if he could read what was on the cover (the title). He couldn’t. He asked me what it said and I told him. Then he asked me what it meant. I paused for a moment thinking how to translate it best. I decided to be completely literal (word for word) and said “Andhaa paid, soti aurat” (literally, blind tree, sleeping woman). Since that day till the day I last saw him, every time he would read some English somewhere, that title would get mentioned. “Kya tha, andhaa paid, soti aurat?” (What was it, blind tree, sleeping woman?) “Haha, haan.” (Yeah.)
He was a funny guy, told many jokes, kept us entertained for as long as he stayed. On this particular day, when the “two rupee” exchange happened, he lingered around longer than usual because he came close to 11, after the chaiwalla had already left. My friend needed him to pick up a delivery but he kept stalling, saying he’ll leave after having chai. We all had some chai (brought over from another shop) and then he left. The next day he returned, in time for the chaiwalla’s morning round this time. They talked business, nonsense, and gossip about other storeowners and wholesalers. When it came time for him to leave, he again mentioned the two rupees. “Bhai, when am I getting my change?” “What change?” “Forgot already? Two rupees bhai.”
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–126
My friend laughed it off, as did he, and he left. A week later he returned. This I heard from my friend, because by this time I had left Delhi to see a new region of India yet again. My friend told me he mentioned the two rupees again, but this time it was three rupees he asked for, the additional rupee from interest. The same routine: joke about it, laugh it off, and then leave. In this way several weeks passed. I was touring the south and kept in touch with my friend by e-mail and occasional phone call. Other more important topics had naturally arisen in the meantime and we didn’t waste our time on discussing this joke. After two months I returned to Delhi. Eventually my last day there arrived. As if I wasn’t already buried under the weight of their hospitality, the night before my friend’s parents took the whole family to an upscale south Indian restaurant as a going-away party for me. My flight to Calcutta was late in the afternoon, so in the morning I went to the barber and got a haircut and shave for twenty rupees, packed the stuff I hadn’t taken with me while traveling, and headed off.
“Ten rupees.” “How? For what?” “Interest bhai,” he said laughingly. “Come on, you better pay up or it’s going to keep piling on.” It was ridiculous to begin with, but now my friend thought it all the more comical. Inside, however, he was getting annoyed. He had done business with him for two years from the time I met him at the store (two-and-a-half now). He hadn’t kept track of the number of times he’d paid for his chai, or fed him omelets or biscuits, or bought him gutkha (chewing tobacco)
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Pranshu Arya–127
every time he came to the store. He could very well have paid him two rupees even now and shut him up, but his indignation wouldn’t let him do that. His character was non-confrontational to begin with, so he chose to laugh it off every time he brought it up. His laugh, however, was becoming less genuine and more forced every time. In the socially pressing matters of life time passed. My friend got married but I wasn’t able to attend. He closed business for a couple of months while he and his wife toured Europe for an extended honeymoon; it was a collective wedding gift all the neighboring shop-owners had pooled together to pay for. After returning home to Delhi, my friend decided to sell the shop to move to a better part of the city. He would try his hand at real estate he thought. A big farewell party was thrown him, again by the shop-owners association, and even he was there. The debt wasn’t mentioned and the party and the move both went well.
My friend was struggling in his new career. He had moved to a more expensive area of town. Though the land was owned by his family (his father had won it many years ago in a land allotment lottery and his parents were already settled there when he decided to join them), just keeping up with the sudden jump in expenses was proving tough. His first child was a year old now, and a second was already on the way. He wasn’t having huge success as a real-estate agent because, being the lucrative market for ground space that Delhi has become, there were already many powerful and well-established players in the game. Occasionally he would visit his old friends and come across the guy. They talked pleasantly but there was friction in the flow, from both ends. Neither mentioned the debt now but both knew it was hovering over them like a quiet dark cloud every time they crossed paths.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–128
They didn’t mention it for they feared coming across as petty. Pride, it seems to me, was keeping both sides confined to their distant ends. My friend had several times thought about inviting him to his house for tea or dinner and rebuilding the friendship by getting this misunderstanding out of the way once and for all. But at the same time he was waiting for a similar gesture from the other side, and not seeing it coming, his resentment did not decrease even after so long.
I talk to him much less frequently now, but when I do we talk about his family and Delhi and India, and how his career’s going. He’s still struggling, but less than in the beginning; he’s nostalgic for his glory days (we all have them) as a clothes merchant. Last time we talked the conversation went silent for a while. I searched my head for things to talk about, and, remembering this ordeal, decided to ask about it. I laughed and said “So what’s going on with that debt? Is it up to a hundred rupees by now?” He laughed but, cutting it short, said to me: “Can you believe I’m the father of two children now? And still, one of the few things nagging my conscience is this small nuisance? It’s not something I think about all the time or ever dwell upon, but just think what a waste it feels to have my entire memory of my unmarried past as a successful businessman ruined by such a stupid thing. Every time I go back there it’s with me. I can’t talk to my old friends with a light heart. They all know about it from him but thankfully they don’t bring it up. I’ve given up cursing it. I respect its existence now and only ask ‘Why? How?’ I didn’t even realize as it was happening, how such a small thing turned into a wall between two friends. As talkative and sometimes annoying as he was, I did consider him my friend after we’d gotten to know each other.”
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–129
“So what’re you going to do?” We were serious now, it was no longer a laughing matter or meaningless episode; it never was, but after a very long silence he was admitting it, to me. “Try to forget, I guess. What can I do?” We hung up and I reflected that inertia is sometimes a greater force than all our good intentions.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–130
Darjeeling man E— (my Italian friend) and I went to a bar one evening after dinner. We ate at Park Restaurant, a popular and upscale local joint recommended by the guidebook we were both using (his Italian, mine English). The food was good but I felt bad for E—; we both ordered chicken dishes but his came out to be a really spicy one, where he doesn’t eat spices at all. He managed to salvage his meal with a lot of rice and naan. Anyway, back to the point of the story. At the bar I met him: a man who was a pain in the ass for everyone who knew him. I am indebted to him because he paid our bill that one and only night we met and knew each other. I heard his story from another person who was at the bar, who was talking to him most of the evening. It looked like they were close friends, the way they were laughing and shouting along with the bartender and other patrons. The picture I got of him the next day was quite different than what appearances made seem that night, which was that of a well-off person who’s more than just somewhat eccentric. The man I talked to worked at a popular tea shop where E— and I showed up the next day to buy some souvenirs to take home. I wasn’t going to buy anything so I was just hanging around. While E— looked around for tea to take home, I started talking to him. “Quite a night,” I remarked. “Yeah,” eyes opening wide as he spoke. He understood my inference.
“Which tea do you suggest?” E— asked. “Well, what kind of flavor or aroma are you looking for? Something light or strong? Dark or light? What do you usually drink?”
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–131
“I don’t know the first thing about tea. I just need it for gifts to give back home. Can you recommend something not too expensive but not too common either?” He pointed to the counter that separated him from us. The tea, he said, was lined up by quality and price, descending from left to right. We started at the right end and worked our way left, with brief descriptions of what was in front of us and how much it cost. “The people I’m giving it to don’t know any more about tea than I do. Can you give me a couple of different varieties?” E— decided on three different varieties, of symmetrical order no less: the line down the center and the two on either side of it. He paid for the tea with his credit card from home and chose to leave. We decided to meet up later for dinner.
I picked up where we left off: “What’s his story? He said you left with his car keys.” “What?” “Yeah, he said a few times that you had left and you had his car keys. He seemed to be just settling in with the local guys when we left last night.” “I don’t know what he was talking about. I left on my own. I don’t know how he got home, but I didn’t have his keys.” “Must have been the alcohol or something.” “You saw it last night, how he gets loud even with strangers. It’s like that every night. Actually, last night was worse than usual. The old general actually told him not to come back to his bar. Apparently he said something outright offensive to the retired old man.” “Did he really? Well, even I could tell just from watching from my seat that he managed to offend a good number of people in just the one night I saw him.”
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–132
“He’s like that. I’ve only known him for a month or so since he came here from Delhi. Nice guy at heart, but complicated as hell, and a nuisance to deal with.” “How’s that?” That’s when he began telling me, in brief, the stranger’s life story: “He came to Darjeeling from Delhi a month and a half ago. He’s staying at a local gymkhana, where a room has been reserved for him, probably through some contact he has there. He seemed to be running from something, the way he showed up out of nowhere in his car, a small shipment of his cargo following soon after. He just showed up at our bar one night and he’s been coming every night since. “The guy’s estranged from his family. His kids have abandoned him. His twin sister won’t talk to him. They’re all in America but the way he talks of them I can’t tell if they’re real or fictitious. He seems to know a lot about America, so sometimes when we’re talking I find myself wondering what he’s doing here.” “What do you mean?” “He seems to have a problem with India and everything Indian, even though he’s Indian by ancestry. He constantly complains about India; but what’s worse, he voices his opinion so strongly and feverishly that it ruins the mood of everyone around him, and he repeats the same complaints every damn time. “It’s the lack of infrastructure and it’s the corrupt politicians; it’s the sons-of-bitches who don’t let you get out of the bus or subway train before they rush in to try to get a seat. He says, ‘1.15 billion people and they still can’t put a man on the damn Moon. All they know around here is to compete in singing and dancing shows.’ They he says. He’s not one of us, not an Indian. I guess he’s American, but really, I’m not sure what he is. But it's really unusual how
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strongly he feels against Indian Idol and its ilk. The guy seems to think a nation's only successful when it can conquer space. He says, 'Let's see them put a man on Mars! But how can they? They're too busy modeling and singing and dancing.' “He does this thing sometimes where he folds his hands, raises them in the air as if about to prostrate before a god, and says “India…jai ho” (India, long live!) or “Mera Bhaarat mahaan, mera Bhaarat pareshaan” (my India the great, my India the troubled); then he laughs like he just told the world’s greatest joke. We, those around him, just smile a fake smile. He’s good at heart, like I said, but it’s tough to tolerate every night.” “What happened with his kids?” “I have just some pieces of the puzzle from conversation, but the rest I can put in from what I’ve seen of him as a person in my time with him. Basically, if my intuition isn’t wrong, he was an ambitious man all his life. Wanted to do this, do that; wanted to be a doctor, then wanted to be a businessman. Somehow he fell in love, got married and had kids (a son and then two daughters). My guess is he neglected them in their childhood to pursue becoming successful and famous and so never managed to be close to them in the first place. Then his wife died when the kids were in their early 20s. “A good man but a bad father, that’s what I thought about him. He’s talked little about his kids actually, and his wife. There’s love in his heart from what I’ve seen, and his intentions are always great and pure regarding them. It’s in action toward them where he lacks and has always lacked. “In him I see a human face for that saying, ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ I mean I don’t know the guy to definitively say his intentions were always good, but
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–134
you get a pretty good impression of a guy after a month of drinking together, especially when he gets drunk and loud every night. “He vaguely described to me how it was when his son recently visited Delhi. They were together for maybe three days at the most (the son hadn’t come just to visit him), and even then they barely talked. He did most of the talking while his son said very little, mostly just responding to his questions about life work and home. On their last evening together they got into a fight, after which the son said he doesn’t want to hear from or speak to him again.” “Did he tell you what happened?” “Yeah, he remembers the fight clearly; probably because, he thinks, it was the first vital exchange between them in many years.”
“I’m going to learn the piano,” he told him. They met in the café at Le Meridien where his son was staying, an early evening appointment between father and son. He’d heard such claims many times over many years. Finally he’d had too much: “Hmm,” he smirked. “Aapke kya kehne. Aap to chaand pe na chale jaao.” (You don’t say. Why don’t you just go to the moon?) “Badtameezee karne ki zaroorat nahin hai. (There’s no need to be rude.) I was just telling you.” There was no stopping the son now. “Tell me,” he spoke harshly, turning toward his father and looking him squarely in the eye; his voice had risen and his face had slightly reddened. “Tell me, have you ever done anything completely, successfully? All your life you’ve been saying I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that; I’m going to make this much money, I’m going to buy this car, I’m going to make this house in this city… What have you done?”
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–135
“Acha.” He said it with such a condescending sneer that the son lost all restraint and let his pent-up anger rain. “Kya acha? Koi jawaab hai? (What OK? Do you have an answer?) I’m so sick and tired of hanging around you. Why do you think I don’t like seeing you? It’s the same damn thing every time: listening to you go on and on about what you want to do; listen to you complain about how everyone’s done you wrong, your wife, your kids, your brothers and sisters, the whole God-damned world; tolerate your cynical remarks about everyone and everything; and then that loud fucking laugh of yours, like you’ve told the smartest and funniest joke in the history of the world.” There wasn’t much left to be said or heard after that. The son got up and left, but not before saying as he was departing his seat, “I don’t want to talk to you or hear from you ever again. We’re dead to each other.” The father didn’t cry. His wounded pride was so strong it wouldn’t let him hurt; instead he got angry, further estranged from the world. He was the one who was done wrong. He had always meant so well, for everyone, yet he was the one being slapped in the face by fate’s strong hand.
The man I was talking to (whose name I still didn’t know) continued: "They say that blood is thicker than water. You can't thicken water but you can certainly make blood thinner. I can see the blood getting thinner all around this guy, the way he's alienated from his own family and relatives. “Above all,” the stranger in the tea shop continued, “he begrudges God. God has let him down his whole life. He’s shared a couple of his still-standing ambitions with me (for instance,
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to build a house in Delhi within 10 years), and in expressing them he doesn’t forget to mention, in some shape or form, that he’ll accomplish them ‘in spite of God’s will’.” “What do you do with a man like that?” I asked. I was captivated with his story but I also remembered how intolerable he was last night for everyone present. The conversation reversed direction as he asked me, “What did he talk to you about last night?” “He came over and sat down at our booth. Immediately when I started talking he correctly placed me as American, and E— as Italian. We were both impressed; he seemed like a knowledgeable and well-traveled person. We exchanged introductions, brief synopses of our purpose in India. He didn’t say much about himself but took great interest in what we were saying. I remember his style: he listened intently to our statement and then nodded as if analyzing what we said for inner or hidden meaning. It looked very film-like, the way he sat: one leg crossed over the other, one arm stretched across the back of the bench, the other holding his drink. “Eventually we were interrupted by the couple that came in who took away his attention from us.” “Oh what happened? I must have left by then.” “A couple came in pretty late into the night. Everyone knew them because as soon as they entered open arms ran to them to give kisses and condolences. Apparently the man’s wife had just recently passed away. I couldn’t place the woman he was with…sister, friend, new lover… Anyway, they started talking, sitting at the bar and drinking beers. The usual words were being thrown around until, in a stark volume increase over the group’s level, our man started accusing the widower of being weak and selfish. He said everyone endures such losses,
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that he should be strong and not complain and despair. The old general intervened, quite suavely I must add, and no fists were thrown and our friend wasn’t thrown out of the bar. Eventually I saw the offender and the offended conversing again in low voices, crouched in a corner booth. I assumed everything had been worked out and was well again.” “Who knows what’ll happen when he comes back there tonight. I don’t know how serious the old general was about telling him not to return.” “He did pay our bill though.” “What?” “Yeah. We were at the bar paying. I had a Rs. 500 bill on me. It was ripped and had been taped up before it came into my hands. The bartended refused to accept it. It was the only bill I’d brought with me, so while E— and I thought about how to pay our tab of Rs. 350, he stole the bill from me and threw his own Rs. 500 bill on the counter. I looked at him incredulously, thinking what’s he doing, but he simply waved us off.” “I told you he’s a nice guy at heart. He’s done little things like that since I’ve known him, which is why I can’t cut him out once and for all.” “But then he said something to offend the bartender. I didn’t hear the whole exchange, but at one point he said of him and indirectly to him, ‘Oh, he’s not management. He just works here.’” Incidentally a young British lad, a writer, who was also sitting at the bar took grave offense and started arguing with him. ‘He’s my brother,’ he said of the bartender at one point. He was a couple of years older than me but I was intrigued by his idealism. Statements like ‘We’re all one nation, we’re all brothers’ sounded fresh coming from a young person, but at the same time trite and hollow because of their overuse by politicians and the socially prominent .
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I continued, “Then he refused the bartender’s pen when he offered it to him to write something, instead pulling out the Mont Blanc from his shirt pocket.” “That’s another thing. He’s got this thing for brands and brand names. I mean who wears a Mont Blanc fountain pen in the night to a bar in a (relatively) remote town in India? Then he’ll go on and on about brands he reveres. I’ve gathered that he holds them as an outward indication of status and wealth, an ostensible sign that reads ‘Look, I’ve made it.’ I mean that’s essentially what they are to everyone, but with him it’s a degree more." We were silent for a while. I pretended to look for tea, although I wasn't sure why I was still lingering. Then suddenly he spoke up again, laughing as he did: "Another crazy thing about him…He had some sort of surgery recently. He frequently talks about his experience in the American hospital. Apparently it was a dangerous procedure which could have taken his life. He was operated on in a couple of hours and then released two days later, without any antibiotics, he says. The crazy thing, though, is that he's so proud of the event! He's proud not only of the American surgeons who operated on him, but the weirdo seems proud of himself for having had whatever he had to deserve such a risky surgery! You should see the gleam in his eye and the strain in his voice when he talks about it!" I was disturbed. It seemed like some sort of mental sickness to me to be proud of something like that. "He's always popping prescription pills, even at the bar, and the guy's even proud of that! He boasts about the basket of medicines he has to take from every morning afternoon and night. He's a really strange guy…seems to be making up for a failed life of unfulfilled ambition in these little things that seem ridiculous to you and me and everyone else at the bar."
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“Yeah, I know what you mean." I didn't, but I had to say something to close the conversation so I could leave. I thought about the man’s family and I observed that one eccentric dominates many commoners, one ambition many innocences. Because of this man’s dreams and desires–not from bad intentions but God-given personality and inclinations–several others probably had to suffer a great deal along with him. I thought about returning that night to meet him and pay him back, but E— was reluctant and we decided against it after we had dinner at another popular restaurant on Hill Cart Rd.
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Pranshu Arya–140
Traveling together The bus ride from Leh to Manali was a long one, requiring an overnight stay in Keylong in Himachal. It was an arduous affair sitting on a bus for almost 24 hours altogether, but a more picturesque and dangerous journey would be hard to find (except maybe from Manali to Kaza in the Spiti Valley of Himachal, which I consider the most dangerous of all my journeys in India). Along with me for the ride were a young actress/filmmaker couple from Israel, a lady from Belgium, another from Texas, and a few Indians. In the seat directly in front of me was an Indian couple, perhaps newly married from the way they were snuggling and holding each other. As the bus bumped along the road the sight of them stirred my imagination and I wrote this poem in barely legible handwriting in my notebook.
We can do all the things other couples do while traveling, If only you would just be here. We can be naive and discuss occasions, Prematurely plan the seasons, Talk about what we miss from back home, Then fall silent to contemplate the reasons. I’ll build us a hut in the mountains Where we can eat and sleep and stay, And when fantasy fades and the dream is over, It’ll be our time to go away. If you came I’d be delighted, You’d fill the void only you could fill. When you’re sleeping I would sit awake, Feeling grateful by the window-sill. On a bus-ride you can sit curled on your side, Throw your legs over mine. When it’s over you’ll get up While I nurse the blood flow back from steady decline.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–141
We’ll laugh at the absurd, And pore over the ridiculous. We’ll stare wide-eyed at the unimaginable, And proudly feel superior to the superfluous. We’ll share earphones for music, And watch movies squinting over a tiny screen. We’ll run out of batteries just before climax, Stifling in our bladders a primeval scream. Sometimes the mist in our heads will cloud judgment, We’ll hold each other tight and close on a cold night. When the fog dissipates in the late alpine morning We’ll breathe in a long freshness to know that we were right. I’ll write to you like you’re still far away, You’ll reply in a note on the table. I’ll struggle with how to respond, To communicate thoughts I’m not able. We’ll walk in the dust of uncertainty, Not ever knowing what tomorrow holds. We’ll navigate our rivers of preconceptions, With each stroke chip away at ancient molds. If only you would just be here I’d tell you so many things. Every night spent under cover of many layers, Everyday worn down shedding many skins. …There I was, thousands of miles from home, and still I felt no more closer to, say, the woman from Texas on the bus than I would to a woman in front of me in line at the grocery store, with whom I share national identity (just as I did with the Texan woman). This led me to wonder what specific ingredients endear us to someone, if it’s not simply enough to share culture and background in a foreign land amongst millions of foreigners. I wonder now why I didn’t think of her when I wrote it. I looked out the window and saw the road carving through the mountains and the occasional jeep and truck carrying supplies, but I didn’t see her–neither out there in the sights and sounds, nor plain and without allegory in
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–142
my mind. I wish I could redo the moment and think of her and have the poem be about her. But just like long ago I declared our tree, today I can declare this our poem, because I cannot imagine who else it could ever be about.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–143
Section 3–Back to our future
On the moving train I cannot sleep. A baby starts to cry. I think of a love lost; love made then lost… Hum mein hi thi na koi baat Yaad na tum ko aa sake…* Back to our future 1 "Hello," she said, "I would like to fall in love with you." "OK," I said, "where do we begin?" "First you'll open your heart to me. Then you'll open your arms, and then your home." I looked at her from my position of superiority–after all, I wasn't the one asking someone to fall in love with them. She was slightly shorter than me though not much. My first thought was she's attractive and we'd go well together. (Her physique was familiar for I'd seen her around and had noticed her. So close to me, however, she took on an unexpectedly rare form. She wore tight black pants and–the part I really liked–an equally tight and fitting button-down shirt, white with widely spaced thick red stripes. They looked like miniature suspenders bursting to contain her incredible bust.) Next I thought how to reply her with equal candor as she'd shown and reciprocate the intrigue she'd created in me. "I'm sorry but I cannot do that." "Why not?" I chose to be frank and replied, "In these matters I don't know how to give, only take."
*Must not have been anything remarkable in me, That’s why I wasn’t thought of by you…
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–144
She was quiet for a while. I wondered whether I'd suffused a glowing flame with my candid cleverness. She turned a few degrees toward me and said, "Fine then. I'll open my heart to you." "Let's go." The day passed with her pouring herself into the cup I reserved for her. It hadn't even started filling. The next day saw us together and also the next. She was opening herself to me freely and openly. Her eyes held not a glimmer of design or thought. It seemed to me she spoke directly heart to mouth, bypassing the mind entirely. In this way we became close. One evening she took hold of my hand as we walked and she talked, and with that another chapter began. The bond of touch sparked a fire in me that was taking to flame inside of her also. We lay in bed for hours, naked in each other's grasp, she still releasing her heart through her mouth into my untiring ear. We made love everywhere, in every way, and afterwards resumed lying and learning–when she forced me to talk I would lie, when she talked I would learn. Her heart and her arms were wide open for me (and only me). I opened my arms to her and told myself no harm would come to her before destroying me first, but my heart I never did open. On a sticky sunny afternoon inside a cool café, the moment came for us to end, just as quickly (it seemed) and unceremoniously as we'd begun. We sipped on lattes as a few parting phrases were spoken: the "wish you best of luck," the "you'll meet someone better than me and better for you," and the "hope you find what you're looking for" were all her offerings; I simply said "thank you" and “you too” and "bye." Many seasons have passed and I question what did I gain and what have I lost. While I don't have answers in clear words, one thought peeks through the unvocalized: I still hold with me the cup I long ago reserved for her; it's full. From my own choice I gave her nothing to
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–145
remember me by, know me by. The result is she walks on lightly, wherever she may be, not needing to think of me. I'm left with my own cup and hers to take always wherever I go; to the far corners of the earth they go with me. It’s true, the more I see the less I know. I’ve never known anything worth pursuing against all odds and minor defeats, so when something I never truly desired or asked for in the first place has me by the throat, I choke on the irony of poetic injustice. I'm tired and my heart is weighed down upon, but I cannot imagine her as anything but fresh and nimble, young still as on the day she asked to fall in love with me. …Tum ne humein bhula diya Hum na tumein bhula sake.†
† You forgot about me, But I could not forget about you.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–146
Rim I’m on the rim of the cup of the thought of you. It started with an emptiness that felt heavenly–warm, ready to receive. Slowly the cup filled with your presence and knowledge. Then suddenly, like all else good that must end, the cup reached its limit. Now I find myself on its rim, straddling the heaven and hell of moments I crave inside and darkness I dread outside. Inside is you in your deadness, because all that’s inside is memories, and they’re dead because they’re all in the past. Outside is the future but it’s pitch black because you’re so completely spread over my horizon that wherever you’re not, light cannot be. Dressed in all white with shoes of indecision, I walk along the curved ledge, sometimes looking within sometimes without. There’s dark on both sides: your burning hot black coffee inside and the unlight of the unknown on the other side. There’s a slim chance I could fall in and survive. After all, it’s floating on this venom that I rose up to where I am now. It’s a slim chance however. The greater likelihood is that I’ll fall off and into what I don’t know. The trouble is that I fear that right now because I’m only just emerging from your cup. I know in my head I’ll be alright after the fall, but the fall itself won’t be pretty. So for now I’ll delay the moment of decision and postpone taking any action and just walk around your cup some more. Sometimes I speed up. Those are the moments where I get hopeful that I might have a surviving chance falling back into you. The excitement reflexively quickens my pace and I only slow down when I stumble. Other times I walk slower than normal, when I’m contemplating no longer delaying the inevitable and taking the plunge to the outside. It’ll hurt I tell myself, but the sooner I do it the sooner it’ll all be over.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–147
Immersed in this exercise of rumination, dressed in all white with shoes of indecision, I would make a popular museum piece for adults and children alike to watch and wonder what this grown man is doing traversing the rim of a cup. “Where does he expect to go with this?” “What’s he going to do? Is he going to do anything?” These are my friends, the ones who see my plight but can’t experience it until they’re walking on that rim. They sympathize, I’m sure of it, but they can’t empathize, so they watch and wonder and even worry. How long I’ll walk the rim of this cup of your thought I don’t know.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–148
Back to our future 2 My God-given inclination would have me here or there, anywhere with you, But my sincerely misguided efforts had me far across the landscape, toiling away half-heartedly at something always incomplete. Tell me then, how could I be happy? I just arrived home. I ran into my neighbor at the elevator. She was getting in to go down as I exited. She greeted me as usual, being courteous not to ask too many questions because she could see I wasn't in the mood. She looked at me a bit funny the whole time, as if she could see in my face that something was out of the ordinary. Her sympathy and gesture of leaving me alone were almost as if to say "Good luck with whatever you're dealing with." …In the living room now, wondering, like I said, on what I've done. In a moment of anomalous brain activity I proposed to her, and she said yes. Now, many hours later, many miles closer to her, I think upon what I’ve done. I poured myself a strong gin and tonic and now I'm slouching in the big leather chair. The city lies below and behind me, lights everywhere, some moving some still. People are getting ready for a night on the town but I just sit, close to the sky, far from the ground. The air feels a bit stale and stuffy. I guess it's bound to when you return home after so long. So much thinking… Heavy deep questions meditate on themselves all the time in my aging mind. But then my mind's all that's young about me (maybe all the thinking keeps it young). I’m young but I don’t feel it in this young body. Lethargy and laziness plague me wherever I go. My mind, however, is well and alive, full of desires and dreams and expectations and yearning for the follies of youth. It makes up for what the body lacks by commandeering and
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–149
overpowering it. But there’s an imbalance still because the body is cause for the mind to worry, a crutch barring it from flying with its dreams at full speed in both childish excitement and lethal anger that, were the body capable, could kill someone. And instead of strengthening it I weaken this body further with this God-damned alcohol… I went to 53 cities/villages/towns/places. I slept in exactly 41 beds. I traveled 64 different bus and train routes, and walked over 50 miles uphill and over 150 miles overall…so my body must still be in good shape, despite all my complaining… I saw trees. They look the same there as down below on my street. How do you identify an American tree or an Indian tree? The roads looked the same, the mountains… I admit the cars were different, and the people looked different, but really they were the same… I expect a difference between borders; it’s something I search for. I want to see a difference between things and people on opposite sides of political boundaries. I cannot make sense of these boundaries otherwise and it bothers me. What’s the difference between American and Canadian? Fahrenheit and Celsius, miles and kilometers…just superficial differences, is that it? I expect something greater, something deeper, that makes us all different, American from Indian…something inborn, primitive–something that renders these divisions and classifications meaningful in my attempt to resolve what I see all around me with two different sets of eyes (one ideally humanist, the other acutely realist)… How can something as pervasive and consequential as nationality not be uniquely apparent in every man’s motives intentions and desires? Since I haven’t found that difference yet I’m still going about searching, always conscious of the possibility that it’s my viewpoint that’s flawed. What's my relationship to this earth? Meeting a new place is like meeting a new person. There's hesitation and excitement the first time, and then, depending on the experience, there's
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–150
either longing or dread (or even repulsion) for the next time around. Just like in meeting a new person I form images and expectations; it's the same with returning to a place I’ve been to before or going to a new place… So I ask, is my relationship to this earth another human relationship? I've said that people are pretty much the same anywhere you go, and if my relationship with this earth is another human type, then it makes sense why I feel that anywhere I go is pretty much the same. Maybe the scenery is different, the color of the earth's skin is different– superficial details are different but inside everything is pretty much the same. …Now I'm in my bed. (I didn’t change clothes; only took off my shoes.) How does it feel? Like it never happened. This curiosity I have at the level of feeling is built in. Sometimes I have to put it in check by invoking reason through memory. For example, right now, I just felt a pang of curiosity of what it would feel like to be in India once again…to be in Kargil on the overnight bus trip from Srinagar to Leh, to walk the narrows streets and see the tall houses and slanting roads in the scary darkness, to climb a steep staircase across the road from the bus stand and have one last chai at nine at night while the restaurant prepares to close…and I had to temper that feeling with the memory of being there and thinking then (again, remembrance inside remembrance) that it's exactly like it is being here, except the surroundings are smaller and tighter. Lying here I remember lying somewhere else, thinking about lying here. If you can keep up with the ping-pong of thought over many thousand miles… It's incredible the things you remember lying face up in a tiny hotel room halfway across the world. This morning, when sleep just wouldn't come, a voice played in my head: You have. Three. New messages. And. Two. Saved Messages. To listen to new messages press 1… I marveled at how clearly I could picture myself with phone at my ear checking voicemail (something I never enjoy doing), and
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–151
just how accurately the voice rang in my head when I'm so far away from it, in both space and time. …Now I'm thinking about her, about other moments we had together…I'm thinking about myself and comparing and contrasting myself against myself in the backdrop of time… I write now for a living. I wrote then too, when I knew her, but a lot has changed since then. What were my words like then and now what are they? My words were young then; now they're established and make me feel old. I'm young and my mind is young, but my thoughts have gotten old. Now I'm thinking about them, my young words of bygone days…
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–152
Young words I think old now. I write freely and openly; words flow now easier than before. I am old now and I repeat myself. I think back to a time long ago when words first came to me. Now they come like disciplined soldiers, in a line one after the other, easy to manage and make use of. But then–I was young then–and the words were wild children, unruly inside my head but full of the most beautifully unimaginable potential. I was young then and couldn’t tame them. The words I have now are of a quieter and more orderly nature; they lack the spark of those of youth that wouldn’t be tamed or captured. I think fondly of those words and those days and regard them highly. I wonder if I could’ve changed our connected fates with maybe some greater effort. I’m old now and I question my earnestness at times. What a beautiful cloud lived in my head then, why didn’t I do anything to bring it out and put it down and immortalize it? Young words are vital; they can be wrong and problematic. They speak from a place of inexperience; a sureness in their audacity that age in time will soon castrate to morph into selfdoubt. They speak fast in a flurry, often incomprehensibly and out of order. They demand your patience and in return reward you with a joy you’ll get from no other words anywhere. They’re funny but also astonishingly serious at times; the way they change their mood you’d think they’re sick. …These words now, you come to me for them… Not so with young words; young words run after you and appeal to your heart so you have to take notice. Their shamelessness is charming and original and inimitable–that’s why I said they’re wild children… What they have– what I once had in their shape and form–I’ll never be able to reproduce.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–153
I wish these words will be forgotten. If I am remembered for this senile speech of experience, to imagine the furious fire young words would’ve spurred in the imagination of men… I don’t have the tears left in me to cry over something so sure that got abandoned to wither away in silence, stilted, in mere possibility. ...But let me be relevant: young words are associated, most of all, with you, love reborn, because I was young then. Perhaps I should be angry with you for taking up all my time and separating me from my young words. But then I think that perhaps you were, to a large extent, the inspiration for many of those young words… I…as I write…I hold beauty in my hands. What is it more than what I deem it to be, what I find in you that I call good and desirable? I create my own world with my hands and imagination, and beauty–your beauty–is just one small part of it. There’s so much else involved. Dirt, water, stones, air, blood, violence–and other words. Endless beauty everywhere to be found, where does one start to look? I can get carried away in your corporeal beauty but that’ll only leave me feeling disturbed and unfulfilled. Instead I choose to focus on what’s in my control, in my hands–the beauty I create. It’s in my mind, this beauty. It needs no outside agent because our relationship is independent and autonomous. It is where I want it to be, and wherever I don’t want it is devoid of it. With this beauty in mind I see the world, I see you, and I don’t feel helpless or at the mercy of others. You no longer possess any beauty I cannot access. Everything beautiful is mine to be had, and whatever isn’t is no longer beautiful. I cannot lose. …There’s a piece of you in everything I write. There you are now, leaning against the “t”, smiling at me. Sometimes you hide behind the period or try to kick the comma one space over. Oh, there you go, squeezing your curvy body through the loopy “o”.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–154
Just (young words) Vacillations of mind and mood From genius-but-dying to creative-but-in-dire-straits to trivial-but-living. ill write like u type talking 2 myself cuz noones around theres a lot to say and so little time, so we cut corners. but im getting carried away and using big words i cant mistype. There’s a time for forging ties, And a time for breaking them. A time for remorse, for pride, for absolution, for crime. There’s a time for you, a time for me. But some things, they’re timeless. Catch them if you can, on paper, on tape, on a fading mental imprint. But as soon as you manage to capture the clock enters the picture and time starts deteriorating whatever’s precious. It’s the irony of all ironies. Here’s a stretch of road I haven’t traveled in a while (How long’s it been?). It’s good to revisit, to see what’s changed and discover nothing has. Twenty years later things have changed, but really they haven’t. The clock’s at work but some things are, thankfully, outside its reach. My mental imprint had deteriorated, but not so much that it can’t fill in the gaps of everything (I imagine) I find changed. In a dilapidated house in the northwest, next to a large warehouse that manufactures house wares. Let go.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–155
Growing old I write from my young oldness but as my mind flashes forward to images of real oldness I shiver and I cringe… Mandatory trips to the bathroom every night at 2 AM, needing two handrails for each hand to slowly climb up stairs, and worst of all, knowing that it's not going to get any better…it adds up to a chilling depression. It would be a godsend to have someone to share that age with. It's creeping slowly upon me as I speak; the time for action is now. My mind sets off to imagine how we'd grow old together… You’ll never comprehend my words, my depth, my spirit… What an unpleasant start, that same stubborn thought… Being so self-absorbed, I’ll search for yours but give up too quickly and easily because it contrasts what I know and live in drastically… Yes, that’s the paradox in my quest–that I burn every moment with the question of the existence of everyone I see around me, but I’m simultaneously too absorbed within myself to satiate that curiosity. I can see you never attempting what I write, let alone enjoying it. You gave that up a long time ago, and at first I was disappointed and discouraged. With time, however, I’ll become indebted to you for having left me that part of me unadulterated, without interference from your always good intentions. (Of course, doing so won't be a conscious choice on your behalf, but my gratitude cares not for such minor details.) At some (lower) level we’ll get along just royally. We’ll complete each other in the majority of the multitude of aspects humans need fulfillment in, and in this way we’ll live together, never fully understanding one another but carrying genuine appreciation in our hearts. My tenure as lover and servant will be sweetly bitter; yours as lover and maid will torture you less, at least from my unknowing eyes. I’ll crave for your out-of-bodyness every day as I watch you go about, simultaneously proud of the dense burden of the chaos that reigns inside my head.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–156
You’ll find me insufferable at times but you’ll never leave. I’ll find you oceans apart in understanding me, and if I ever do leave I’ll be the one to come find you once again. We’ll curse and laugh and fight and love; we’ll talk and walk and sit and breathe. We’ll both wonder every waking day how we ended up here, but the road is so long and so dusty our footprints have long been erased, and we can’t trace our way back even if we wanted to. Never attempting what I write… I remember that time I gave them (her and my best friend at the time) something of mine to read… “I want to write what only I could write, in just the words I choose and none other; something that cannot be serialized or rushed to deadline, or edited by someone else. It must retain the form that I give, and subscribe only to my tutelage… Like the daughter I won’t let any suitor near; my sole creation and prerogative.” Then I stopped, thinking I’d conveyed my sentiment. I wasn’t so much looking for a reaction as listening to myself speak. “You talk too much,” my friend said. “She says I don’t talk enough.” “I can’t imagine." I gave them the piece to read. Both looked uncomfortable afterwards. My only confidantes didn't know the depths and vulgarity my young words were capable of. They could read in my eyes that if they said anything I would instantaneously slap them with the contempt of non-understanding, so for both their sakes and mine they silently handed the sheet back to me and strained not to look ominous.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–157
The factory What was it I gave them to read that they didn't know how to respond to? It was only a dream I had about India long before I went to India… Red pussy, green pussy, yellow pussy and, finally, purple pussy. It was the first factory of its kind in the world, an ISO certified production facility for the sole production of pussy for India’s consumption and enjoyment. An innovative and, not surprisingly, controversial Indian industrialist had come up with the idea. He was appalled and ashamed with the female feticide rates in his country, so he thought why not give them all the pussy they could ever want. This way the country’s lecherous men would be satisfied, the insufferable women could finally sleep a restful night’s sleep, and the girls who’ve managed to survive into adolescence could proceed into adulthood with a much higher chance of evading disrepute. His face was everywhere, from CNN to Playboy, YouTube to tens of thousands of personal blogs. Before revealing his idea to the world he had the “world class” facility secretly co-designed and co-constructed by the Germans and the Japanese. Afterwards he proudly gave tours of the place to the press and visitors alike, charging the latter a hefty fee. Indeed the site was spotless and amazingly efficient (the first batch off the line was good enough to achieve CSA certification); the workers were exhaustively-trained and competent artisans and seemed very happy with their vocation and proud also of their contribution to alleviating India’s plight. The concept was very simple: Men would purchase pussy at their discretion from an authorized outlet. (The outlets weren't franchised. Their design, construction, and operation were as closely monitored as the product they were selling, and they were under the sole jurisdiction of the project. R— promised that they would stay that way and wouldn't be franchised ever.) When satiated or just fed up, they could discard of the pussy safely and
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–158
without fear at any outlet (a 25% refundable surcharge was levied to encourage proper disposal). From this succinct model stemmed so many desirable repercussions: Wives were spared the torment of undesired sex and pregnancy; mothers were spared the worry of their daughters’ whereabouts and fates upon maturing into a saleable commodity; the daughters themselves were made free to wear the clothes they wanted without fear of being ostracized, and choose the man of their choice to settle down with or fool around with. (When they chose to stop, the spurned man could easily go to the nearest outlet and get what he wants.) “A progressive and genius idea if the world ever saw one.” “R— has done for the society of India what Gandhi did for her politics.” Statements like these graced the front pages of the world’s most vaunted newspapers. The project was executed out of earshot of shareholders and board of directors, so it was obvious everything was funded from R—’s own fortunes. He had taken the dangerous risk of becoming alienated from his shareholders (and hence his wealth) were the idea not pleasing to them, so strongly did he feel for this venture. In his turn R— was very humble about his “revolutionary” idea and “astonishingly big” contribution to society. He attributed his newfound fame to the recent birth of his daughter. In fact she had been present, in her mother’s arms, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the pussy factory. The pussies came in different versions, red being regular and purple the most exclusive. (R— had come up with the denominations himself. “I didn’t want the usual labels like bronzesilver-gold-platinum or cryptic technical ones you find on electronics. I kept it simple and gave them very plain colors.”) Pricing was reasonable according to the first run of customers. R— had banked on his business and political influence to bring the idea and the product into the people’s line of sight. Major Bollywood celebrities and even respected politicians spoke out for
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pussy, saying what a great thing it’ll do for India and encouraging Indians to embrace it. Of course a patent was pending in India as well as the U.S. and the EU. The website gave complete and accurate details of the manufacture as well as technical details for those interested. “Centers are opening as we write,” it said, “all over the nation. Our flagship stores in New Delhi and Hyderabad are open for business, along with smaller centers in Orissa, Bihar, and Andhra Pradesh. Please join our mailing list and we’ll e-mail you when a center opens near you.” “What a fucked up dream,” I thought, shaking my head like they do in the movies, thinking it’ll shake the thought from mind. I showered, ate a bowl of cereal, read the paper, and listened to music videos on TV to kill time indoors. When I couldn’t bear the boredom anymore, I stepped into the elevator and made my way down into the penis factory that is India.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–160
Growing old 2 Then, quite on its own, another possible picture of our future comes to my mind… It’s a fine evening. I’m sitting in the alligator-skin armchair (the same one I sat in earlier), legs perched on a matching ottoman. The view outside, overlooking the city, is as fine as it was when I first saw it, but it no longer mesmerizes the way it did then (just an hour ago!). Wearing white cotton socks mismatching black wool pants, slouching just a bit too much, I ask “How did we get here?” The fireplace is on; there’s cold outside. There’s another fire, the one inside me that I want to reveal to you but you’re not there. You’re upstairs, talking on the phone as you get ready to go out with your friends. A cigar entertains me and a simple gin tonic keeps me company. A soft ghazal plays from all around me, but it’s not enough to drown out the sound of hip-hop that trails down from your distant corner… It's not how I remember her but it's been so long that in this dream I imagine the worst for how she could be… We’re old and aging, but still you fight every day for your youth. I fight too, but my fight is silent, internal. You fight to keep what you can see, what others can see. I fight to preserve what I suppose I never had–peace of mind, simplicity, lightness. The struggle comes effortlessly to you, and to some you even appear to be succeeding. Me on the other hand, since no one can see me struggling, I’ve become confined to the one-way journey into the oblivion of old age, without a second chance or a hand reaching out to grant me one last dance with youth. In my stint to understand humanity and what it means to be human, I marginalize your personality (that’s uniquely yours) to the point that I stopped relating to you a long time ago. To my sweeping eye you’re the same as the rest of them, after the same thing, functioning in the
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–161
same mode. It’s only me and the select few others I’ve only read about that are different and truly unique. I managed to evade your desire for children many years ago, after we got married… I still don't want them, but who knows what she feels; maybe she has some already… I thought myself clever and deft. I think we’re better off for it, but I can’t help wonder sometimes, still. You have many things to keep you occupied, but for a single-track mind like mine that splits off into infinity infinite times, wondering is all I can ever do. I bore you. You elude me. In the throes of my heart's ambiguity I want you to sit with me but also leave me alone. I want you to keep me company but when you’re here I want you gone. Leave me with my thoughts, my books, my drink and my music, my torturous solitude that I wish to engage every breathing moment of every day. It's how I live! Go only so far away as to not leave me wondering irritably where you’ve gone. Stand behind me and cater to me, simply turning off your needs and your desires. I’m much too old and learned and aware to blame myself on you or anyone else, even life. Some people, I’ve concluded, just don’t belong to a certain time or place. For now, I try to belong in this armchair, music and drink for solace, a landscape pasted outside the large window to cover up the decaying reality that churns inside me. …I turn over in bed. Where had I started and where I ended up! Now I'm thinking about what I've done…maybe it's not so bad where I am, how I am, alone and self-sufficient. (And what if she wants to have kids?) But what about that smile of hers, that lightness of being; what about those wrinkled years I see so swiftly approaching? I recall a personal prophecy from many years ago, when, without my knowledge, my mother visited a renowned soothsayer in the alleys of Delhi, who told her that I would become seriously sick before reaching middle age. What else
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Pranshu Arya–162
did he tell her? That I would marry a beautiful woman… I imagine not being able to move, like Mrs. York, and the way I feel it is so visceral that I freeze for a moment. I really can’t move for an instant because I’m paralyzed by the fear, but then I thrash about the bed for a rapid second to compensate. Another picture in my head, this time about taking care of each other… She lays there, clothed and surrounded in hospital white, body battered, soul shattered. Arms are at her side, one leg is resting peacefully flat while the other points to the ceiling, held up by nylon rope, forcibly kept straight in a hospital white cast. How she got here she doesn’t remember, but all she sees now is her limp body in front of her and all she feels is the lack of her own presence in all joints bones muscles. She’s utterly motionless, at peace everywhere except inside, where it really matters. I'm with her, quiet as she is but for the rare remark on the benign, the unimportant. (The weather’s been overcast for a few days, the relatives are calling and feeling snubbed for being discouraged from visiting, coworkers the same…) She stares at the ceiling directly above her and asks the hospital white to pass the time swiftly, but when she looks to the clock only two minutes have passed. So her day passes amidst mental agony and the physical numb. It’s late in the evening, time again for her to relieve herself. She can’t move and I must help her. I know what to do. She feels my hand on her crotch (at least there’s still sensation there, she thinks). Staring straight up still, her eyes swell at the thought of her own helplessness. She’s looking down on herself now from above, the devil of her soul hovering in stark contrast to the hospital white ceiling, laughing at her condition of shame and disgrace, a scalpel in hand cutting at her pride without anesthetic. Abruptly she turns her head to the side, closes her eyes to stop the tears she feels are coming. (They come anyway; she can’t stop them quickly enough.) My gentle hands feel what
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my eyes do not see, what she is feeling inside but cannot bring herself to say, even to me. I feel her shame, and although distressed by it, I smile that childlike smile. I move my hands away and softly touch her arm. After a few seconds delay she brings her dilated eyes to look into mine, and hears me say these words: “Some day soon I’ll be lying there and you’ll be standing here in my place. Tell me, how would you want me to feel then? I’ll be entirely in your hands, under your care, exposed and at your mercy. Will you want me to feel ashamed and my pride slighted? Am I not you and you me? Aren’t we one and the same? Then why these tears, this sad loathing for yourself?” I don't know whether my words can or will reach her, but I mean them just the same. She sees my smile in a blurry picture through the tears, and although they don’t change how she feels, my words warm the temperature of her consciousness just enough to turn her head once again to the side in peaceful resignation so I may continue where I left off. …This is making me sad. I get up and walk to the bedroom window, looking out below. The light bulb above the bed shines and reflects in the window, bright even after so many months if disuse (how that affects its working I don’t know)… She was good at taking care of me back then. She would nurse me if I had a fever or a headache, turn off the light as I rested my head in her lap so it wouldn’t shine in my eyes and exacerbate the throbbing… Light bulbs in India are different. There they use tubes in most places. Along with being properly installed in ceilings they often hang from them. I even saw tube lights inside cars–overhead, in the dashboard, even inside the glove box… Light bulbs. Who makes them and where do they come from? I know this much: If everyone asked as many questions as I do, there would be no light bulbs to light this world, the roads we drive on, and the light I need to look at her when it’s dark outside.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–164
I remember from TV many months ago an ad campaign about the human element. This human element is present in the light bulb, from invention to creation to production to delivery to consumption. From chewing gum to rocket ships, the human element is behind everything. This human element is the artist’s domain. I ask, can the human exist in its ever-evolving form without the artist? Even in the miracles of nature there’s the human element–to perceive it. What does the tiger’s ferocious beauty mean if I’m not human enough to perceive it; what does her beauty mean to me then? If that weren’t subtle enough, there are so many shades to this crucial element that a clean little Bell curve can be constructed to say what’s more human and what’s less. That’s where society enters the equation: Whatever more people follow and believe becomes more acceptably human that what the outliers practice. Back to light bulbs…am I to believe that the people who made those bulbs that lighted the top of that semi-truck driving the other way on the freeway as I was coming home…am I to believe those people think feel and function the same as me? Do they ask questions when they’re making light bulbs every day? It’s very possible, but I can’t imagine it no matter how wide I open my mind. I’ve said repeatedly that the world rests on the shoulders of these people who work to create what’s useful. So where does the artist fit in the human picture? The artist doesn’t create what’s useful. When has art ever been useful? But stop and consider the base of the human pyramid in those working people. After all, despite the vast difference I placed just now between them and me, we can’t really be that different. We’re both still human after all. What do I need to function? Motivation, inspiration, energy, reason. Is it fair to say that art provides all those things? It’s never the same thing to two people, but what
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ever is? Why does the working person spend the money he makes manufacturing light bulbs on a show, or a book, or a CD? That’s where the artist fits in the human picture. …The drink glass on the windowsill wants a refill, and I’m starting to feel it around my waist why people don’t sleep in slacks with a belt on. With a grateful sigh to bring me back I go to change. The clothes in my closet are cold and stiff since no one’s touched them for a few months. As I’m changing my thoughts go back where they were and I remember that at least I still have my human element, my artist’s domain, those troublesome young words…
Proposal from Calcutta
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Young words 2 I'm old now and I talk to women and girls with ease. I even sleep with them occasionally; but before and after I do I have young words in mind; their memory pinches me to feel remorse for neglecting them. Young words; I remember how in the company of a beautiful woman they created their own bottleneck in my throat. Most times I just wouldn't speak, and on the rare occasion that I did (when they made it past their own obstacle), they came out in such a dribble that she left scared and stunned by their untamed nature. It was her fault, of course, for not appreciating their genius and coddling their innocence, but it was always I who suffered on their behalf. Still I couldn't forsake them for they are my kin, and so I lingered on, under the voluntary weight of my young words, always searching for someone who could share that burden with me (and would do so with pleasure). Here I am; I'm old now and my young words are still with me. But they're tired now, and that's what remorses me more than anything else in life. I want their weight back, I want their constant nagging and pestering; I want them as dividers between the world's women and me. I'm old now and I'm happily willing to carry them alone until the day I part from breath. You'd be offended and appalled by my young words, but you'd be astonished and impressed too… What's the use of saying these things now? What they had and wanted to give to the world they implored me to assist them in doing… I'm the only one to blame, really. Give me some guilt to carry on my back if you can't bring my young words back to life. I was quiet complacent afraid in those years when young words were bursting with life inside my mind. I wasn't a complete failure in giving them voice. It's just that I feel I could've done more. The opposite is true about us now: I'm less concerned and they're the ones holding
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peace, still inside my head. What do I have to lose or be afraid of? I'm old now, the elephant's gone and the tail is all that remains (an expression I heard in India). I feel I should at least give the light of day to those young words that I did write down. Even if time has passed they still remain young; such is their immortality. Generally but not always young words speak to moments and lapses of time. Spans of time, lengthy or otherwise, aren't their domain. It's well too since they're impatient and impulsive. They're observant of the acute and choose to disregard the obtuse, with exception of course… Or no…is that right? All this talk of them and I'm getting pulled into their confusing world, full of paradoxes and 180° turns… Let's try again: young words are sparked by moments, on a moment's notice. From there where they choose to go, choose how wide a web to throw over space and time, is a process too mysterious to classify and generalize. There's no science to it.
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Pranshu Arya–168
Landscape The entire landscape changed. A wildfire swept through and erased every feature of what there was before. Now there’s nothing, and your singular seed dominates the flat horizon of my vision. The weather changed later, the landscape changed first, so I can’t say the former caused the latter. I stand stunned, trying to take in the sight of everything gone, before taking even one step toward rebuilding what I saw alive only yesterday. Destruction precedes creation, so the blaze that visited that night is not entirely unwelcome. The seed awaits fertilization for an entire jungle to grow. In the meantime, however, at this juncture, in the nothingness between destruction and creation, possibility dances hysterically in the empty vastness.
As long as I can dream I’ll be fine. I don’t mean dream as in having hopes and aspirations. I mean literally dream, at night in my sleep. That’s when I awaken to what’s happening within. Throughout the day I’m perfunctory in whatever I need to feed this stomach, but it’s at night, while I sleep, that I come alive. The world’s mysteries unravel in my sleep. My own mysteries garner explanation, and nonsensically comical commentary proffers uncanny (often uncalled for) wisdom on the day’s concerns. But I haven’t forgotten that it was a dream (in someone else’s bed in Calcutta) that got me into this whole mess. No science. Why I write, why I called, why I proposed, why… These questions have no logical answers. Meanwhile sleep's not coming, so I get out of bed again and walk to the window, again. You don't see stars in the city sky; it's too dirty from pollution and city lights. I remember all the countless stars I saw in India when I was out of the city. I was more impressed
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because it wasn't in the mental picture I had formed of what I would see there. What had I expected? Besides mountains lakes and snow I expected to see poverty garbage and more people than there are stars in the till-then-unseen night sky. I remember… Sitting in a straw chair in a guest house porch in the cold night. I'm far away from civilization, north even of Leh, in the dry and dark of the otherworldly Nubra Valley. I keep having to force a smile every so often so the irritated skin on my face doesn't freeze from dryness. It's a bit uncomfortable holding my head at such a sharp angle to look straight up but I can't help it. I've never seen this many stars in one sky before; so many stars have never penetrated my eyes before. It keeps recurring to me that there's a blanket on the sky. The couple glasses of chaang (local beer) I had earlier didn't warm my insides, it's cold enough that I need a blanket too. …Another ping-pong game of memory! Remembering while sitting there out in the cold under a warm blanket, what a starless bald head the city has, even when it loses electricity… Many months ago, I got home from my desk at the magazine editor’s office to discover there’s no electricity, just like when I left in the morning. Apparently it had been coming and going at frequent intervals all day. So there I was, sitting in my room with the computer screen (running on battery with another half hour’s juice left) for lighting as well as a single candle on my desk. I stepped outside, trying to find deeper meaning in the darkness of sleeping streetlights down far below. I looked up at the stars and strained real hard, but I found nothing. All that came to me was the question of when the damn spark will return. I even sat outside, trying to feel the silence and the darkness, but it’s all bogus, what they show in the movies. There are no moments like that in real life: soft music playing in the background while the protagonist broods
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over love scorned, unaware that his love was never really scorned, that the problem was she loved him too much. …It's an old memory, but did she love me too much? Too much? In the imperceptible progression from young to young oldness I devised this idea of too much love. What is it? It's stifling and guilt-ridden for the one who is loved. For the one who loves it's a source of strength and inspiration. By my own definition, then, I was always loved too much, and the ones who loved me were better for it. I don’t know about this true love and meant to be business. What comes naturally to some was an intellectual exercise for me. I had to learn to love through a mechanical process, by reasoning that the smartest and best thing for me to do is to give all my love to one person in the present, without worrying about what other possibilities may exist out there–presently or at a later time. I mean, thinking strictly from a logistical standpoint, how can it be that so many people somehow manage to come together with the one person they feel they’re meant to be with? …In one of my analytical moods one time I thought up… Say you grow up in Cleveland. The one you’re meant to be with could be in Guyana for all you know. Now it’s one thing if it’s predetermined from time immemorial that you’re meant to be together, and so fate and life conspire to unravel your life in such a way as to have you meet at some point in your early lives. …Why I chose Cleveland and Guyana I don’t know. I can’t recall anyone I know from either of those places, and I’ve never been to Cleveland, let alone Guyana. I guess I was trying to think outside the usual New York London Tokyo… But, being more…pragmatic, picture you growing up in Cleveland (or any other city in the developed world). There’s a numerical statistic attached to every single possible outcome: you’ll live past one, past thirty; you’ll stay in
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Cleveland for college, you’ll go to another state, you’ll go to another country, etc. Suppose you end up going to Boston College. It’s a city of a few million, but hardly the whole world is concentrated there for you to take your choice of mate from. The world (from a numbers standpoint) lives in Sao Paulo, Bombay, Mexico City, and so on. Anyway the point is that in whichever city or state or town or even village you find yourself in during that window of age where most meet a significant other, there is a chocolate box assortment to choose from, however unchoicely the choice may seem. You’re brought together more by circumstance than all other factors combined, so how can you say you’re meant to be or destined or whatever else you like to imagine? What if you’d gone to California for university instead? Not assuming that your choice of university (and all other choices preceding it and following it) is entirely predestined, the outcome would be unrecognizably different than where you are now, having been where you’ve been. Sure, you’d have someone, you’d have some vocation. It’s as if we walk through life with an empty ice-tray, the compartments representing the various aspects of our life, and the circumstances we end up in decide what and who fills our tray. …As far back as I can remember, I've had with me, in some corner of the mind, the silhouette of a mysterious beautiful woman that I consider ideal. I can see her right now, leaning slightly forward in an open doorway, the flood of light behind her trying to come through whole but managing to pass only after maneuvering around her curves…wearing fitted black pants and a crisp cherry red tube top…long shiny black hair, olive skin…focusing further, in isolation I see dangerously sharp eyes, long slender neck… I can see everything but the shape and outline of her face. She’s been like a second shadow I’ve always had to carry.
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How long, though, can I live on the promise of an image? Even when I try she doesn’t solidify into a photograph; time passes but she remains always an impressionist work of art, something someone long ago painted from a dream he had, a woman from another part of the world, unlike he had ever seen before, and lay it face down in a corner of his dark dusty studio because he knew not what to make of the strange image that drew him in unlike anything before. Having the benefit of hindsight (and further experience of living with an inchoate image over the additional years), I can maybe now seriously entertain the consideration that I called the one I'm meant to be with, because even after all these years of being apart from her and with many others, she's the one (the only real one) I always think of, the one I came back to on that last night in Calcutta…
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–173
Balance Now that I haven't seen you for some time, I love you for the way I think you look, for the way I remember you looking in your finest moments, for the way I want you to look. Why is this? It's because I'm afraid, of myself. I'm afraid of my own caprice, which is bound to flare up in the future as it has in the past. I'm afraid that I might be tempted to act upon it one such time. Even that would be alright–I would be happy, you would be heartbroken but would soon get over it. Except, I know I wouldn’t be happy (but you'd still be heartbroken, or so I flatter myself by thinking). With her (the next one) the same situation would recur; the same veil of delusion would be installed between her actuality and my partial acceptance of reality. I would accept those facets of her I find gratifying to the senses, and for the rest, I would fill the mental void with imaginings and wishful thoughts. …Scary thought, the likelihood that I haven't changed a bit in all these years. My caprice cannot, will not take over anything. But really, this could go one way or it could go the other. Divergent paths confound at every five paces. To do or not; to do this or that; the variety of my choices, past present and future, immobilizes me from action, leaving me stranded and playing armchair philosopher to my own destiny… Why does it feel the things we want never happen? What happens we discover too late is just what was needed. Much desired gratification never comes in time… My sincerely willing it will make it happen, and still if that doesn’t, the simple step I need to take will always be more than arm’s length away to grasp and carry out. A fleeting emotion flies chaotically like paper in a slight wind. Track its motion and soon my eyes tire. There’s no logic to its motion, only beauty. But ask the emotion what it feels and tearful eyes drain me from pity.
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Thriving one moment, just alive the next, gasping for air a moment thereafter, and finally dead; these are the cycles of emotion, and they jump around from one to the next without warning or indication… My head will be long lost before any viable explanation presents itself. …I would like a hot bath. It's been a while since one. All I managed out there was the rare hot shower with rationing for water. It's also been a while since I've seen a bathtub. Everywhere I stayed when I was going around India had an “open concept” bathroom, so along with my body the toilet seat (and even the sink sometimes) got a nice shower too. It's a stark contrast I see between my eyes and mind… Right now, clean white walls, a nice large mirror over an off-white marble counter; a matching sink. What do I remember there? Bathrooms small like closets; some with windows, most without. Myriad of patterns on the walls… The one that I recall now was a green background with chips of other-color stones inlayed in chaosmade-beauty style… Floor and wall both stone. Flimsy toilet seats, rickety faucets; white or grey pipe coming from the sink and ending just before the drain in the ground. Most of the time water didn't get out of the bathroom, but everywhere was stone floor, so even when it did it wasn't a big deal… Right now my feet and mind need rest… A picture that came to me, of all places, in an art gallery in Bombay: a large circular room with white walls lights stairs and no corners. As I arbitrarily picked a starting point (knowing I’ll end up back there) and made a circle, I thought… In the large white room of life there are no corners, nowhere you can lean to take the weight off your feet and gain rest. (For rest there's the other room, but you can't come back.) You have this but you don't have that, you don't have what he has; you must always stand on your feet and work these out–there's no other choice.
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–175
The question is always of your balance. Are you standing straight and sturdy or is there more weight on one leg and less on the other? Maybe you managed to build a successful career but lost out in love? (No and yes.) All your family left you but you have your health; are you straight, balanced, or are you crooked and miserable? No one's watching you, don't worry… No one was watching me there. I was in the gallery all alone except for two security guards (one of whom played on his cell phone while the other read the newspaper). A recently deceased Mexican painter/sculptor’s work was the feature exhibit… You're in your room alone, it's all yours. Watching you is your own mind, communicating every moment with your spine, your legs. If they're not happy you're not happy, and the only way they're happy is if you're standing straight; equally on left and right, with good and bad, with the designed and the unforeseen. …I’m in my room alone and I'm not worried about being watched here either. But I am worried about other things: what I've done and what I have to do next, who I've done it with, about growing old and doing it alone. Where's my balance between aging young mind and neglected young body, love of myself and love for her… We’re contradictory creatures, every one of us, both within ourselves and in society. The way I pictured it in that all-white corner-less art gallery was every man woman child, like two poles, distant and irreconcilable… On one side is what’s noble and exalted and on the other what’s vulgar and subhuman. It’s a task switching back and forth between the two opposing modes of being, of seeing, of relating judging and feeling. One end is the mother and grandmother; the other the mistress, the slut. In one corner the bride stands in sparkling white; in the other she lies naked, the very same night, in her husband’s
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bed. I picture your open arms longing for my embrace, stretched as big as your love, spanning one pole to the other. I also picture your legs, also open, wide as the poles themselves, longing for another embrace; one that’s less talked about but as genuine and natural as the other one. How we morph our interaction from the field of one pole to the other is the art called relationship… On a naked afternoon back when we were together she asked me why I like it when her legs are open before me. I thought for a moment, searching inside what to say and how to put it. I had mastered by then the look of rumination with her, with which I could sit silently for a brief period and think without appearing like I had ignored what was asked of me. The way I did it was to sigh deeply and sink back into the chair or shift position in bed and place one arm under my head (if we were lying down). I would tap my fingers softly on the nearest object (the table, the pillow–whatever happened to be within touch). My eyes sometimes stared straight ahead, sometimes at the ceiling or my rhythmically moving fingers, or straight at her (to tell her I’m thinking intensely about what you asked). On this occasion I didn’t take too long to think. I raised myself to lean over her lying body and told her while stroking her hair and looking not into her eyes but at the soft skin of her neck: “The world is there, and for you to become vulnerable to share it with me is a gesture as endearing to my heart as few others.” …What I didn't share with her that day is why I enjoy that sight with someone who’s not dear to me. In that instance, I reason, she is an adversary in a struggle for power. She had the upper-hand till the point we hit the bed. Now it’s my turn, and I want to see her as weak as she can get–with legs open, her world exposed and ready to receive me, the king of that world for the night. I’ll rule over her savagely, civilly but with anger in my blood for having been largely powerless till now. Next morning when the rising sun turns a new page, she’s once again the
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empress with tightly locked legs, and I the pauper floating between an already exaggerated memory of last night and renewed desire for that other world.
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Pranshu Arya–178
Time When will the sun rise and when will I call her again, I ask the white wall. What time is it? …Now I'm looking for the time and there's no clock anywhere in the bathroom, dammit. What time is it there? I think about the one I left behind, the one I didn't even turn back to look at one last time at the airport because I was consumed (that's the word I used then, right?) by such a compelling desire for this one… Contemplate on desire, from the everyday mundane to the once-in-a-lifetime all-possessing. There’s thought involved, intense but not always intricate. Sometimes it’s a sweeping kind of thought that skips details and gains fervor from fuzzy expectations. Other times there’s so much detail that you get tired in trying to organize it to come up with a plan of action (thought and action, that same thought from before)… She must be awake now, that's a certainty, maybe in class, maybe at home in her apartment on the 20th floor, doing whatever. I wonder if she thinks of me, holds it against me that I didn't look back. I wonder if I hurt her. What’s the nature of time? Putting that one aside and getting back to the one at hand…I hadn’t talked to her in years until Calcutta… To talk to you is to go into life’s lost ledger and account for long-settled gains and losses. Accounting, which I despise and never understood, is what you take me into. Do you understand? You live in a world I consider microcosmic, even unreal sometimes, so to think that I was once a part of that world is unsettling now. Of course, when I was there it was larger than life, but such is the all-too-familiar work of man’s conceit, no? Where you live I imagine everything’s made of plastic, liable to break if I lean against it and take a moment to pose and look around. Even you’re sometimes a wooden figurine, crafted
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by distance and the passage of time. But I desire you just the same, and that’s the only bridge over the vast gulf I myself created between the past and the present. …It’s a new day now but I’m still thinking as if it’s the last… That’s how I live sometimes in terms of you, in the past, trying to hold on to what no longer was–what I myself gave away. I gave you away but never figured out how to let go. It’s my own fault, of course, and that’s why I’m awake right now and you’re not. (Or maybe you are too, thinking about me?) You’re moving forward, toward the new day, yielding to nothing but destiny’s call, expecting really nothing but what each day brings your way (like it brought me one day long ago). And here I am, still stuck in the mud I wanted to play in long ago because it shone like gold from far away. … I poured another drink before coming for the bath, after staring out the window looking for stars. I'm slouched in the tub, both arms over the sides, water up to just below my neck. I’m thinking of Calcutta again… It's one moment that we're both sharing right now, in time, on two opposite corners of the earth. How can they say she's ten and a half hours ahead of me? I used to think time's a creation of man, but isn't it really just dictated by the Sun? Didn't we have to make it so that we all live on different times so we can each live sanely? Damn it, so what the hell is this time business…it's one moment that we both share but I can't call her… Oh yes, I remember now, she's in the same eastern time zone as me; she's sleeping like the rest of the east coast. I'm the one awake thinking crooked thoughts and waiting for the sun to rise so I can call her. The sun; as I wait for the sun I remember a sunny day in India, one that didn’t represent well my mood and how I was feeling… Three to a bench, benches facing each other in pairs, one set on either side of the aisle down the center. This was the seating arrangement in the 2nd class compartment of the Taj
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Express from Delhi to Agra. I sat at the rear end of the car, on the very last bench, facing forward. Next to me sat a young couple who didn't seem married but traveled with a heavy duffel bag. I thought she was rubbing her leg against mine, at one point I even felt her foot against my thigh after she took off her sandals and curled up her legs. I wondered what she was thinking, and thought how much better it would have been if she were alone like me. I pushed my leg out to see how she'd respond. She stayed firm in her place. I couldn't see the action because my bag was in my lap and obscured the view below. I casually moved my bag, feeling somewhat excited by the mysterious acts of my neighbor, only to find the foot touching my skin belonged to the old lady sitting across from us. Her foot rested on our bench and her leg was covered by her sari, which is why I couldn't tell before that it was her and not the one next to me. After this failed episode my eyes looked beyond our little cabin. In the next one forward, across the aisle and facing me, I noticed another girl. She looked young but I couldn't be sure. She looked over at me a few times while I observed her and her companions. At first I thought it was a mother/father/only daughter kind of family but then I saw her talk across the aisle to what looked like a brother. I was most struck by the father, who looked like a retired general: a stern and upright man, rich in integrity instead of money. He must have been a doting father, I thought, when she was young. Now he's probably more quiet and strict, but not unreasonable in granting liberties. He probably trusts his daughter to make the right (socially acceptable) choices and worries about her in private, maybe with his morning tea on Sundays… Across the aisle on the opposite bench was a one-child family. They were flippantly doting on their young son, but, to be fair to him, he was well-behaved and didn't annoy on the journey. I was surprised to see the man openly rest his head in his wife's lap. She looked like a good wife and mother; she gently patted her renegade husband’s head while he napped, and
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stroked his hair as she stared out through the steel bars of the window. Later on he pulled out an iPod which (I reflected with regret as I remembered how my own music player was stolen) was secured around his neck. His son immediately demanded the earphones, and his demand was instantaneously and smilingly fulfilled. I thought how different that was to how my father was with me. I didn't make such innocent demands because I knew it to be futile from a young age. Innocence hurts. The world seems cruel and you wish you weren’t so. …I never did decide that day how I was feeling. I just knew it wasn't sunny.
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Time again I'm still stuck on time, but now I’m thinking more generally… Is life long or is it short? The easy, all-encompassing answer is it’s both. In some ways it’s long, in some ways it’s short. The real question is, what are those ways? Life’s too short for taking time getting to know people. It’s too short to not take chances and invite a stranger (who’s not too strange) into your home. It’s too short to take too long to make a new friend… She’s now like a friendly stranger to me. I won’t waste an extra minute delaying what I want with her (as soon as I finally decide what that is). I’m anxious that it’s not morning yet, even though I know that when morning comes I’ll be anxious that it’s finally morning and I have to take some sort of action… If you meet someone tomorrow, don’t take weeks or months in getting to know them. Your whole life could change–not necessarily for the better–and the sooner you let the change happen, the sooner you’ll recover from it, learn, and move on. Life’s long. To take a vocation you don’t love or at least enjoy is a death sentence, because life’s every day is much too arduous to spend buried under responsibility… Every day at some point I wonder how tragically I would fare if I were stuck doing something I didn’t like; if I had to write business letters instead of articles for a living, or if I had to run a store like my friend in Delhi… Life’s too long to commit a crime against your conscience, because conscience creates time: Please it and time flies, go against it and sloth seizes the clock, weighing you down with it. Life’s too short to not get attached. When else if not in this lifetime will you experience the agony of love unrequited? Of love scorned. Of needing someone who doesn’t need you. When will you experience the childish one-upmanship of being needed by someone you laugh
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down on because you don’t need them? …Unrequited, scorned, need…these words stand for me for our last days together. They’re words meaningful only in the sphere of love, and that sphere I only once let myself experience–with her. Love wasn’t unrequited or scorned, but how can I begin to picture what that would be like if not with her as my heroine? In those last days we both said little but I know we both felt so much… What’ll you do when the tables suddenly turn and the one you thought needed you leaves you with the knowledge that you need them, and not the other way around? Life’s too short to get hung up on little things… Things I said, she said, they said or did. How much time will I waste in dissecting what happened or didn’t happen? Time that–for someone else not me–could be spent doing innumerable other things, each more worthwhile than another. Life’s too long to overlook the little things… I don’t want to be sitting one evening, alone, wishing I’d done this and done that, and said this or hadn’t said that. Life’s too short to care, and too long not to care. …And vice versa. It's a lot of thinking for what was supposed to be a night of rest, but I can't help it. I've brought myself such a situation that to rest with it unresolved is to insult its uniqueness and undermine the grand thought of its potential impact on my every night to follow. I wonder how many people, least of all people I know, have found themselves in such a romantic situation in their lives: A proposal distant in space rescued from the intestines of time. I feel as if I'm playing back our old movie but giving it a different ending this time. There I was, reaching into time's mouth and pulling the words "Will you marry me?" that I never even thought about uttering back then from deep within her digestive system (where they were almost fully
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digested). There, reaching out in space, from one side of the globe to the other, to the last place I knew her to be, hoping she's still there. She was. …Marriage, the concept and I have a long-standing mutual dislike for each other. I haven’t bothered to attend weddings of distant relatives or acquaintances. One time, I remember, before even her, I saw wedding photos being taken on a perfectly sunny afternoon and I thought how I don't need a special day… I don't even want my special day. Dressed up and walking around and pretending to myself that I am king for that one day. Looking at all the faces looking back at me. Seeing some forced smiles, some wrinkles originating at the corners of numerous mouths and radiating outward like ripples in a pond; then seeing those wave-like wrinkles interfering with a similar set of waves formed due to the squinting of the eyes, which are blinded from the mighty sun. Some bellies hanging from the crisp white shirts, stretching that gentle cotton while testing the elasticity of the fabric. Seeing some genuine tears in a few eyes, so few that I can count them on my fingers. I don't need that. I don't need that, because I know as soon as that day starts, the thought of what lies upon its demise will bother me. From the very get-go, I'll feel less special knowing that when this day's over, I'll be filed and ranked in the minds of all those people who're there–and even those who're not–just like all the men who came before me. They'll oblige me for these few hours, only to cross my name off their long (or perhaps short for the lucky ones) list of people whom they've become unfortunate enough to develop such a relationship with, where the only connection they share with you is one which is only for the sake of being able to lay a small claim upon you, if and ever it would benefit them to do so. "Oh yea, I know so-and-so. I was at his wedding just last month. He said I would be excellent for …"
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Hundreds–scratch that–millions came before me. Only to be forgotten. What can possibly justify wanting to join their league? You see them every day, walking in their tuxedoes through the grassy meadows, getting their pictures taken. Those same pictures adorn their fireplace mantles. Those same pictures get thrown into boxes and relegated to the hell of storage when they realize the end of those brittle, ephemeral relationships which they naively called love. (That’s the pessimism of young words!) It's a sick cycle, yet it repeats indefinitely. Why? Perhaps because we're weak. More often than not, though, it's because we're possessed, from as long ago as we can remember, by that devil called Tradition. I would much rather avoid all that. The truest selflessness is to be selfish in the eyes of the world. They'll hate you. They'll misunderstand you. These are good signs. They'll cast you aside and speak as if you died the minute you found yourself. That's when you know you've found yourself. "To be great is to be misunderstood," Emerson said. …I decided then that I would heed his words, because the opposite must be true as well, that to be misunderstood is to be great. Even today I haven't accepted it (marriage)–I've only given up being hard set against it. I think I’m less cynical now than these biting young words had me being. And–what matters most right now–it sounds much more romantic to ask "Will you marry me?" than "Will you come live with me?"
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–186
Just words Another morning, except this one I'm seeing after a long time where I'm most used to seeing mornings: from my balcony on the 28th floor facing southwest, looking over water and roads and cars and people. It's late though; I fell asleep at some point and slept through the sunrise. The light is harsh and there's noise rising up from below of the occasional honking horn. I'm usually out of here by now, because once it hits this late in the morning and the veil has been completely lifted from the portrait of a city waking, it's hard to get out. I can work from home just as well as out there, and staying back I would avoid the sunlight and the heat and the discomfort of drastic temperature difference between two worlds… Waking vision: I see myself in a river delta. I'm standing on a small piece of land looking out to the sea. (The way I picture it inside, even as I stand here, isn't how it really is. I picture many tiny streams with hardly any flow and depth and width, meeting at a single point near me to flow ahead calmly as one. The land I stand on, in my imagination, is almost level with the sleepy water, and seen from above, the picture looks like a precious stone with thin veins coursing through it. In reality, however, the landmass I'm on is rather large and significantly above the water level, and the bodies of water are neither calm nor shallow, but loud and ferocious and running deep.) Behind me are the thousand rivers of my own life; independent and intertwined channels running together to end up somewhere adjacent to where I stand, where they converge into a single stream and flow on forward as one into the massive sea. …What does it represent, the analogy? The rivers, the delta, the sea? Each stream represents a different phase and aspect of my life that has already passed. Behind me is the past, ahead of me is the future. I'm standing in the space of time, with present all around me. This
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river to the far left is the one of my birth. Really it's all one river, but to see it all at once, in one complete image in my eyes, I've spread time out over the space of the delta. There's my birth…there's leaving one place, settling into life in another place…my first friends…there's the choice I made of what to study… It wasn't really a choice. I was caught and simply flowing along in the river (that one there) of expectations that I had both cultivated in myself and been handed down by virtue of my birth into an educated middle-class family, to study something that'll earn a successful living, something that has career prospects after graduating… There I go to university to study some such subject… I really liked the idea of studying, of being studious and dedicated. I wanted to conquer and vanquish whatever I studied, but soon enough I realized that was an unrealistic movie-ish notion until I absolutely fell in love with something. Unfortunately I never quite found what I was looking for in terms of the right subject to study. Like I said earlier I write now for a living, and university helped me there to the extent of having a large collection of books I could borrow and read (at the time expense of reading course textbooks)… There are also other smaller thinner rivers, let's not forget; the ones representing the things I did like and enjoy, streams of my own choosing where I felt at home if even for a while. A journey I undertook on my own…a book I read, a record I heard, a person I met or a picture I saw… Artistic endeavors mostly. I was troubled because they were the distraction from the then primary purpose (and not the primary purpose itself) of my life, which was of course to study a career-earning subject at a reputable university. They felt more primary yet they were the secondary. So now where am I? What does this mean, all these rivers rushing forth to this point where I stand? It means life's brought me here, to a point of convergence, to see with deep
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clarity the choice I've made without really making a choice. My life's goal was to end up here, all those streams were to converge here. All that time wasted going down all those different paths served to only bring me here. I could have come here directly but really I couldn't have; it was my personal fate to come by so circuitous a path. I can't say I learned anything extra by taking so many detours, but maybe my judgment is clouded as I stand here and see everything at once. My entire life flows before me; there's a lot of noise and action as water collides with water, so it's difficult right now to recall the takings-away from an individual river when I was riding it alone. Now I have no choice, there's only one stream flowing forth. At its start, where I stand, it's kind of weak as the many begin to become one and their various directions and speeds crash, many at a time, in a confusion of direction and speed. I see the eventual outcome ahead of me so I'm not worried, but I'm going to have to shake about in the confusion, at the start at least. That's where I am right now, confused with self-doubt about whether I'm ready and able for the resurgent flow that lies not far ahead. But, like I said, I have no choice. It's the only direction available and hence the one I must take. The streams flowing behind are many different things but the lone river ahead is the river of words I choose (without choosing) to ride for my remaining life. Words were what I always wanted, and words are where I now stand. Words will drown me for a second, throw me around in their initial frenzy, and then carry me forth to the sea of contribution, where each man and woman deposits his and her ability into the mass of the world. O, not now! I don’t need more confusion in my thoughts and story, not now! Here’s another meaning for the image of rivers… There, behind me, all those girls and women I’ve
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been with, including her…now, standing alone, ahead of me, there she is… I have no choice but to go forward to her… Words and her: the two lasting occupations of my life. This book is fluff. Words then more words–all fluff. Fluff, much like snow, is singularly meaningless and collectively substantial. Just as enough snow will cause a roof to give in, so this fluff can start an avalanche in one’s thoughts, prejudices, and entire belief systems. Snow is a perfect analogy to the fluff that is words. On a foundation of crystal flakes of frozen water man has built remarkable structures and even monuments. So it is with words, that through cohesion of thousands, each one weightless as the next, a rock-solid statement is formed that can endure for millennia and reach millions. I could've written anything, anything at all under the sun. Why did I write the words I did that have filled the pages of this book? This is my brief and shallow attempt to displace myself from them and comment upon their fate, for they have a fate of their own. I believe they had no choice but to come out this way; it was my fate that they were to be delivered through me. Like pictures they have association, most strongly to the people they talk about and where they were written. When I read something my mind instantly takes on the color and mood of their time; I watch it happen each time, and it's laboring to change the mind's scenery so drastically so frequently.
After I called and talked to her I sat down (to let what's happening sink in…) and turned on the TV and went through old notes on my laptop (…by, ironically, distracting myself away from thoughts of her), and the words brought to mind their time and character… Here I read about the politician's son we had a run-in with on a Delhi night. My friend and I didn't retaliate physically and managed to escape unharmed. When I came back from my next trip there was a
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story in the paper that he had been shot, in the same place he and his friends had hassled us. I kept a clipping of the article for proof… Here, here's a pleasant one. The friendly residents of an old age home in Ki village in the Spiti valley. They offered me their simple food one afternoon I showed up after walking many miles, and didn't ask for any money or anything in return… Almost making a fool out of myself in the Delhi Metro… Meeting a beautiful girl in the Valley of Flowers… Breaking out in hives and itching like a bastard four nights in Bombay… I can't tell you these stories right now. I don’t have the patience and wherewithal to focus on anything but what's happening with her. Instead before I go I'll give you a brief picture of India I created there…
Proposal from Calcutta
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Picture of India I picture a great big canvas, borderless, hanging from a big white wall. It was a uniform off-white before you painted it according to my directions. I’m no painter but I had a vision, and I appreciate your patience, friend, with my occasionally vague instructions. You started by shading the background, shading light to dark from top to bottom. It wasn’t too drastic a gradient because while the top was pristine ivory, the bottom wasn’t any darker than the color of your north Indian skin. Now, that's it, start at the top and work your way down… Impressive emperors like the Mughals, representing today's aristocracy and VIPs…a line of them across the top of the canvas…men and women, men with crowns and mustaches and royal dress and women in ornate saris and heavy jewelry. Just below them put their officers and people of their court and all that. It's not so important who they are as long as they faithfully represent the social classes of today's India. Work your way down from the top till the bottom depicts those who're a shade above animals in this society. There, that's it… What do we have here…a great big canvas representing the people of India. The little individuals remind me of chess pieces, or those sandalwood carvings they sell all over India, elephant within elephant, a badshah riding atop the inner one. Yes, the ones at the top of our picture are badshahs and their begums. You've done a good job, friend…there I see the officegoing middle class, men in suit and tie, women in skirt and blouse…just below them the slightly lower local storeowner, followed by his workers, followed by the waste collectors and beggars. It's a complete picture I would say. Now, here's what you do. Draw me, and please, be gracious and represent me well…place me just a tad below the office-going middle class but noticeably above the next category of storeowners. Young as I am I don't yet earn like most of the office-going types, but
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my status and extent of privilege here is still greater than the storeowner's who, in this picture, is formally uneducated but experienced in his trade. Now friend, and don't be shocked, please place a transparent green mask over the picture, but listen…begin at the office-going class…spare their faces but grab their torsos and legs…a light transparent green, and again, in gradation, work your way down so that by the time you get down to the untouchable filthy destitute ones, the green has turned into black and their figures are entirely unrecognizable (but still perceivable, to signify that something is there). "Why are you doing that?" The mask, friend, represents the separation between the separate worlds Indians live in. So the ones in the clear (literally), the ones up top, their circle of acquaintance consists of only their own almost all the time, and extends to just include the office-going middle class. Their daily dealings are mostly amongst each other, the ones high up who I've left clean and clear; their servants and drivers provide them a cushion from the world they themselves belong to. The other world, the one I came here to experience (and did experience), is the world of everyday haggling and corruption. It encompasses a majority of the office-going but not all of them (torsos and legs taken but faces spared) and everything below them. In this realm there is clear disillusion for those not used to it, which is me. The dealings in this world, from what I’ve seen, run from the top of the mask to the very bottom, so that in the course of a day a storeowner can come in regular contact with everyone from his office-going neighbor to the begging family living in the alley behind his house; the storeowner's son who just got caught talking on a cell phone while driving can speedily pay off the similarly dirty green police officer a few hundred and move along. The wife of the worker in the storeowner's shop can comfortably spend ten minutes bargaining with the subziwalla (vegetable seller) over the price of tomatoes cucumbers
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cauliflower and bhindi adrak mooli. The worker, on his way home from work, can shop around for something as simple as a rickshaw to take him home. Other examples you ask? Let me think… The 14-year old storeowner's younger son can park his motorcycle outside the liquor shop and within 5 minutes have a bottle of local whiskey in his hands by bribing an idle rickshawwalla to buy it for him; the daughter of the sister of the wife of the brother of the storeowner can get a comfortable discount at his shop: cash, no receipt, no record of transaction– hell, any customer can transact an off-the-record purchase with a nice discount if he doesn't demand a receipt. Abruptly turning to him, with a sly smirk on my face, I said: “How much am I paying you to paint this canvas?” “Five hundred rupees.” “How much did you say you wanted when I first asked you?” He lowered his eyes and smiled from embarrassment: “Four thousand.” “That’s right. Where I found you there were twenty other painter buddies of yours ready to paint for 500 if you weren’t. I happened to see you first and bargain with you first, which is why you’re here and nineteen others aren’t.” In the green world the car has the right of way, always. The motorcycle has to move for the car, the rickshaw for the motorcycle, the bicycle for the rickshaw, and of course, the pedestrian for the bicycle. It doesn't matter who belongs where and who doesn't; everything is ad hoc and determined by the convenience of those involved–the higher up in the picture you are the more your convenience matters. "Jo hoga dekha jayega" (Whatever happens we'll take care of it then) they like to say. Here in India if a car runs you over it's because you were in the car's
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way and no one was around to pull you out of its path in time, which, incidentally, brings me around to the point of culpability. Here in India culpability for minor crimes and losses lies with the individual and not the system. So when my cell phone was stolen from a train while it stopped for 10 minutes at some station in Bihar, it was my fault for leaving it out in the open, and not the system's (the train) for allowing non-passengers to board the train at stations. And honestly, it makes sense to me. The individual is the first and strongest line of defense for his own possessions and safety. If that defense isn't in place, he (I) should not expect anyone or any system to provide adequate backup support. Maybe that's why you won't find morons here suing the street-side chaiwalla for not labeling his clay cups with a warning that the tea is hot. On a more serious subject of loss, let's take suicide. The trains here are open–the doors are manual and can be opened from both outside and inside, even while the train is moving. (In fact smokers like to open the door on a moving train and stand by it while they smoke.) On the non-AC cars the windows have steel bars instead of windows. So when someone stands by an open door but instead of smoking chooses to jump, whose fault is it? Obviously, in India at least, it's the person's and no one else's. But there is a flipside. Train robbers in India (I was told by two fellow riders on the train from Bombay to Delhi who ride frequently) are known to fraudulently trip traffic signal lights so a train that has a clear path will be given a red light and forced to stop. Once it stops, they board the train, do their thing and hastily depart–maybe or maybe not hurting or taking lives in the process. Now whose fault is it? When I purchase a train ticket and travel on a train, I want a comfortable journey, but more than that I expect that I'll get to my destination safely. If the system can't guarantee me that, isn't it the system's fault for designing a train (and traffic signal)
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that anyone can access and easily tamper with? I am the first responsible for my own safety, so sure, I can choose not to travel by train, or better yet, I can go to the police and drop all else to make it my life's mission to fight all train robbers in India. Or why don't I carry a gun or another weapon with me when I travel? But practically speaking, what choice do I have in my hand, in this day, something that I can work with that will actually solve the problem and not aggravate it further (like carrying a gun)? Is it not wiser to work on the prevention side than after-the-fact? To me, in this criminal matter, the first line of defense is not the individual but the system. …Speaking of trains, the television turned on to a story on Zee News right now about a woman who just disappeared from a Shatabdi Express luxury train going from Lucknow to Delhi. She wasn't traveling alone but with family. She went to the bathroom to change clothes. When she didn't return her husband went to check and the bathroom door was open and the woman was missing… It’s a completely different world in some ways, with a refreshingly different way of living; a place where they still repair things (like shoes) instead of swiftly replacing them; where paper is harder to come by than cloth much of the time; where pedestrians yield to cars, not the other way around, and slower cars must move to make way for faster-moving ones. Here garbage sits on the surface as an invisible reminder to those who create it (and honestly they don’t create that much); monkeys cows cats and dogs roam and inhabit the same streets as their human conquerors. Here there is love on the inside and hostility and defensiveness in their faces and visible acts. Here you see just what adversity (from western eyes) man chooses to endure every single day, a testament to the strength of his will and desire to live (which he may not even be consciously aware of).
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Here everything costs less except laundry and genuine electronics; clean water is not-yetbut-getting-to-be a rarity. Men dress in pants shirt belt and leather shoes that are kept clean. Underneath their socks and underwear may be torn and carry holes. Here they love their India but strive to make their ways western. Their minds are always being blown away because every other thing is “mind-blowing”. They dress American, speak American, act American. But I must say, friend, that whether deliberately or not, their–your– hearts remain distinctly Indian.
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Heart Life changes in a heartbeat. The world begins with the beating of a heart. Many hearts gather to rejoice. This little heart brings matured calloused hearts to their knees. The stopping of one heart’s beating causes many others to swell. They cry and join and collide; some perish, some survive. Some heart, somewhere, just started beating. Another just stopped. Some heart beats right now, thinking of you.
Anyway, I have to get going. I have many things to do aside from my work. Today I cannot stay here. I can't waste another day in my pajamas drinking coffee or gin/tonic. She's given me a thread to walk on, the length and light of which I'm going to traverse until I fall or she takes it away from me. I just don't know if I'll be able to recover if it's taken from me this time.
I called her. "Hi." "Hi." I thought about asking her how her day was, to abruptly break from the macro world of the years passed into the microcosm of her individual days. Instead I ended up saying: "The air is pregnant with tension." "What?" she responded. "Never mind." It was my failed attempt to lighten the situation with my ill-timed humor. I still hadn't asked her what her life circumstances were, whether she was married, divorced, with or without children. She had said yes, she would have to break the illusion.
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Then again I spoke, straight from my heart. Any consideration of bridging time and establishing comfort I previously had was gone. Now I spoke from fear…now from desperation… I knew and recognized still the unlikelihood of what I had set out to make happen actually happening. I mean, she must have been hallucinating when she said yes, right? Maybe the same brain condition that made me call her afflicted her in that moment also and as a result of that she said yes… This doesn't even happen in the movies, how can it happen in my life? I stood unarmored and unarmed before her, scared like a little boy but proud still of the curve life had thrown me–us. All sorts of simple yet freakish images sacked my brain… One second before her army of kids starts yelling in the background…her husband's about to call out from behind Honey are you taking the kids to school… (But then maybe) she stands alone, in her impeccably clean apartment, still in her night gown, crowding the phone with both her hands, her long black hair falling over so they can listen too… "I've lost…” I thought about what I was about to say, but really my judgment was clouded and I had no faculty of discrimination about what to say and what not to say within me. Maybe I was thinking entirely from my heart and none whatsoever from my head, or maybe I just wasn’t thinking at all… “I’ve lost so much in you that losing has lost all meaning for me." The honesty must have dripped from my voice because as soon as I had said it she began to cry and wouldn’t stop. I remained silent on my end but I could feel the tears streaking down my cheek. Wait…now she's about to stop crying…she's about to tell me we can't do this… Now the husband's going to enter and say something… She's about to abruptly say she has to go to work (that was the worst possibility, to leave this unresolved because of something as benign as work)… Godammit will she say something, or will you just say something…
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"Can I come see you?" Through her tears she managed to convey a yes. There was more to say but for sure this was the place to stop for now. Our lives (at least mine, because I still couldn't say with certainty how sure frightened excited uneasy or shocked she was feeling) hung in the balance, and the weight that would throw them off were these words we would say, as soon as they became spoken. These fluffy words. Whatever more I would say would be in front of her. My face would speak what I mean more than what my mouth would say. My body would communicate with hers after a brief initial hesitation. We’ll try to stitch together the separate fabrics we weaved in the time we were apart. We’ll discover something new, something shocking, something engaging. Like working on a puzzle we’ll huddle together, slightly nervous because the puzzle we’re working on is ourselves, highly personal and gaping with holes that might involve people places and things we’re unwillingly susceptible to.
My journey starts here and, in a way, ends here. I’ve lived and spoken from the past, but that’s because it’s completely and uniquely mine. Some things I did, some God made happen– whatever the reason, it all led to this point, the only place it could have led to. The singlemindedness of life and the inevitability of its course are both comforting (someone something bigger smarter than me has control over this life) and somewhat disheartening (I said it’s mine but how much can it be mine if I hardly had any control over it?)… Memories are all your own to make. Take a childhood, a small town out west, and a song no one but you listened to at the time, and there you have it: a memory that’ll linger in your being for as long as you live. You’ll pity yourself for being so lonely back then, so out of touch with culture and fashion. You’ll pride yourself for living in a world of one, when culture and
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fashion didn’t matter; all that mattered was the song and all the dreams it raised in your spirit… The web of culture and fashion that ensnares me now wasn’t even in my consciousness then. It’s hard to imagine that time now, which is precisely why sometimes I try so hard to do so (I can’t even remember what my concerns were when I was very young; where was all thought directed?). Family and relatives meant more then, and even though my thought-sphere existed more locally than universally, the thoughts were untainted and not as jaded. I shivered a long time ago. Wearing thick track pants and matching sweatshirt, curled into a ball in the center of the bed under a blanket and a quilt, I shivered because I was feverish. It was the happiest day of life thus far because I wouldn’t have to go to school the next day. Now I realize how small my world was back then. I can see the house, the nearby park, even the school in one picture in my mind. It seemed so large then that little world of that tiny town; it’s all there was. The few milestones found in every town comprised the waypoints I led my life by: the grocery store, the park, the school, the railway track, and the bike paths. The world–my world–has gotten bigger since then but the feeling is still the same. Today’s new and larger purview is only as complete as yesterday’s smaller ignorant one, and no more. Everything I needed was there then; everything I need is here now… Despite all its sentimental trappings, you know you were still the same back then as you are today… I had the same penchant for rumination even at a tender age. I suffered through a cherished childhood because of it… These nostalgia-inducing memories rise up from the burning wasteland of the past and carry over to the senses where they attempt to deceive you with their romantic aroma. Don’t be deceived; you’re happier today than you were then… I’ve seen heartache and experienced infatuation. My thoughts may be jaded but I’m also better equipped to handle them (and there are many more outlets for escape for when I can’t). I’m still
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–201
searching today as I searched then (that’s never-ending), but the specific questions I ask have matured in tone and grown in their scope. I have the same number of meaningful relationships today as I did years ago, only now with different people (completely different, now that I think about it). Of those back then, a few have soured away and a couple endure. Of the new ones (like my friends in India) I wonder how accidentally fortuitous were those circumstances when we came into one another’s lives. But, like I said somewhere before, in company the heart takes courage. At least for now, as I get ready and walk out of here and head down the elevator and out into the world…at least as long as I have her purpose in my step, her voice in my ears saying “Come here”, and a picture in my eyes of her waiting for me, my heart has company. Surely there must be a reason why I’m still alive, a purpose to my living (especially after the risks I encountered and survived through while traveling through India). I am a faint man, one of the esoterica who live on the fringes of community; one foot in the muddy puddle that is society, the other in the clear stream that flows within. (It’s not out of pride that I extricate myself from the masses. Rather, it is a conclusion I have reached after long and thorough meditation, mixed with a healthy dose of instinct and impulse which characterize the very person I am.) From this precarious position, this no man’s land of very few men it seems, I observe everything, both inside and out. These have been my observations; this has been my story… Never content with what he has or what he’s given, the human animal forages far and wide in hope of possibility and opportunity. This scavenging brings him progress and evolution, but it is also the cause of much pain and distress. Where to strike the balance between the two realities is a difficult question and an even tougher task, but still a few exemplary examples of his species manage to do just that. With their light they lead the rest, who blindly follow, not
Proposal from Calcutta
Pranshu Arya–202
fully realizing what they’re following or what they believe in. They’re still evolving, seeking what’s better, the truth. The wise one has realized that better is always relative, forever in perpetuity, and so his search comes to a quiet end, like a forest fire raging inside of him that suddenly dies one day, peacefully going to sleep after years of frantic, directionless activity. …The fire served in me a vital purpose, and now that it’s partially gone and silence reigns I feel some quietude within certain parts and desires. I can perhaps console my other half (who seeks after her) in whom it still burns with full force, but he wants to burn right now (in hope and expectation). Besides, there’s really no consolation to be given, but the burning man will take anything, like a drowning man will cling to a splinter… The burning man is the everyman. We’re born burning: with curiosity as children, desires as adults, and regrets as life winds down and the fire no longer has any more forest to swallow. …I think about those who have reached the higher plane where the fire of evergreen curiosity has ceased to burn. They have traversed a unique path, one designed just for them by divinity. They are grateful and look humbly upon life, illumined now with the flame of compassion for their fellow man who is still tortured and still tortures himself and his kind in his sincere but misguided search for truth, beauty, and peace.