Month: March 2005
Nothing much, really
This morning I woke up at 6 (you’re reading a diary, remember?). The intention was to take a walk in the nearby woods (you remember my last walk in the woods, don’t you?), as the weather had turned surprisingly warm since last week. But when I lifted the blinds I saw a gray sky, quite unlike the clear dawn I had gotten used to since last week. I decided the weather was not good enough, and settled down instead on my sofa with the Financial Times weekend edition. One columnist there was urging people to restore the tradition of wearing hats, another spoke of his encounter with Kasparov (who viewed the world of politics like a chess board, with Freedom playing White against Communism, Fundamentalism etc), and yet another described a meeting with our good old Khushwant Singh (who apparently regrets having missed many opportunities “of seducing women because I didn’t have the nerve. Some of them were more than willing, as they told me later…” Now that, I told myself, is one regret I must not have to reflect upon during my old age, looking back at these youthful days filled with opportunities).
But seducing women demands an amount of time and energy I presently do not have, so I’ll put it aside for the moment. Life@work dominates most of life right now. And when things at work turn busy for both wife and me, a pattern emerges: we eat out every other day, disorder reigns at home, wife skips her piano lessons, I skip my chess sessions, and each night I barely manage to read a page from a book on the bedside table before dozing off. Leisure is word that belongs to a different century, surely.
One idea behind that walk into the woods was precisely that: to experience leisure and solitude. There is a pond in the middle of the woods where you can sit on one of the benches bordering it and gaze into the stillness of the water, a stillness disturbed occasionally by the wind. After a while you realize that your mind – occupied with nothing other than observing the swaying branches of pine trees reflected in water – is reaching a similar state of stillness. In summer, when the wind is warm enough, you could sit there for hours doing nothing.
The birds no longer visit our backyard: the yellow bag hangs empty. (The red one is full, but I found that it hangs on a branch that has no branches nearby – so only a hummingbird could access it, but we don’t have those here.) Last weekend a sparrow-like bird with yellow feathers came by several times, along with its mate (the other birds seemed to come alone, but those of this kind always came in pairs). It seemed to be very sensitive to its surroundings: even small movements of my camera would make it fly away. The others weren’t like that – they pecked at the bag blissfully, unmindful of a someone nearby clicking away. In all, I spotted six different kinds of birds; suddenly I find myself curious to know more about them (the names seem to matter, after all!).
There’s nothing much else to say, really. I’m off to the barber now, and will be working for rest of the weekend. And you surely don’t want to hear about my work, do you?
Visiting places
It had been a while since they had travelled anywhere. They wanted to, but couldn’t; they never spoke about it. On this Saturday evening, she suggested a walk through town: let us pretend to be tourists, she said, and picked up the camera. He didn’t see the point, but agreed.
Afternoon rain had followed morning snowfall, and although the slushy streets made walking difficult, the sky was clear and the air fresh; it seemed like a new place after all, she said.
Around a corner, she pointed to the church tower at a distance: that looks interesting – we must walk towards it.
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It was the town’s only Protestant church, one they crossed each day driving back from work, and yet, from this street at this hour it seemed unfamiliar. Was it the light, he wondered. Or was it the snow?
On hauptstrasse, boys were throwing balls of snow at people passing by, who stopped, glared at them for a while, and went on their way. Unruly kids, she remarked. Those in our town are so well behaved – things are so different here.
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He played along (he’d realized that one only had to look at things anew), and added that this main street looked more modern than the one in their town. She looked at him, surprised and elated, and he noted he hadn’t seen that glint in her eye before.
Soon they reached the church, whose tower rose majestically against the backdrop of a blue sky. He took pictures; passers by looked at him the way people look at tourists in a not-so-touristy place, wondering why were they visiting this town at all.
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In a parking lot next to the church he spotted graffiti on a nearby wall. They walked towards it to get a closer look, and stood for a while examining it the way curious people look at murals in museums and churches.
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The walk back was through familiar territory: they returned along the same route, seeing things they had seen moments earlier, but from the opposite direction. A small bulldozer-like vehicle that hadn’t caught their attention earlier looked impressive this time, standing alone in a vacant plot.
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Back home, they sat down and looked at the pictures they had taken. It was a nice town, they agreed, and decided they should visit it more often.
Bird Watching
Some neighbour of ours (I don’t know which one, but God bless her) has hung up two small gauze bags with some bird food on the branches of a presently bare garden hedge that faces our balcony, and every now and then a bird flies in and takes a peck at them.
Some days back I spotted a blackbird trying different angles of approach at the yellow bag.
And today there was one – I do not know how it is named, but what’s in a name anyway? – with a blue crown and a black band crossing its eyes. What a magnificent costume, isn’t it?
A strange thing I’ve noticed is that the birds usually go for the yellow bag, while the red one hangs mostly ignored. Is it the colour, or is it the food?
First Sentence
Mesmerized by the arresting beauty of the first sentence in a book he had started reading, he thought: Do not judge a book by its cover, judge it by its first sentence. The next instant he was at his bookshelf picking out titles and looking for first sentences…
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)
I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Annie Dillard)
My suffering left me sad and gloomy.
Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
While the present century was in its teens, and on one shiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour.
Vanity Fair (W.M.Thackeray)
“TOM!”
Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain)
My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house.
Living to tell the tale (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe in everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.
Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)
Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone (J.K.Rowling)
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D.H.Lawrence)
Ah, the merry month of May!… Spring, the sweet spring … Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!
Adventures of Tintin: The Castafiore Emerald (Herge)
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Chandran was just climbing the steps of the College Union when Natesan, the secretary, sprang on him and said, ‘You are just the person I was looking for. You remember your old promise?’
The Bachelor of Arts (R.K.Narayan)
The first Wednesday in every month was a Perfectly Awful Day – a day to be awaited with dread, endured with courage, and forgotten with haste.
Daddy Long-Legs (Jean Webster)
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.
The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
He lives in a one-room flat near Mowbray railway station, for which he pays eleven guineas a month.
Youth (J.M.Coetzee)
Except for the Marabar Caves – and they are twenty miles off – the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.
A Passage to India (E.M.Forster)
People here in Western civilization say that tourists are no different from apes, but on the Rock of Gibraltar, one of the Pillars of Hercules, I saw both tourists and apes together, and I learned to tell them apart.
The Pillars of Hercules (Paul Theroux)
Parmanu 