Nostalgia

“In Esmeralda, city of water, a network of canals and a network of streets span and intersect each other. To go from one place to another you have always the choice between land and boat: and since the shortest distance between two points in Esmeralda is not a straight line but a zigzag that ramifies in tortuous optional routes, the ways that open to each passerby are never two, but many, and they increase further for those who alternate a stretch by boat with one on dry land.And so Esmeralda’s inhabitants are spared the boredom of following the same streets every day. And that is not all: the network of streets is not arranged on one level, but follows instead an up-and-down course of steps, landings, cambered bridges, hanging streets. Combining segments of the various routes, elevated or on ground level, each inhabitant can enjoy every day the pleasure of a new itinerary to reach the same places. The most fixed and calm lives in Esmeralda are spent without repetition.“

This is Marco Polo speaking to Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, describing Esmeralda while thinking of Venice, the city Marco Polo grew up in.

Grandcanal1

Last year, during this first week of April, I was roaming the streets of Venice. The twelve months since then have not diluted my memories or lessened my longing to spend a small portion of my life in that city.

I spent some time today going through those photos again: the gondolas, the bridges, the systems, the people. And memories of my visit spread through the mind like canals criss-crossing the streets of Venice.

There are, as Italo Calvino writes, two cities in Venice: one above water, and one below:

“Thus the traveller, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror, and the Valdrada down in the water contains not only all the flutings and juttings of the facades that rise above the lake, but also the rooms’ interiors with ceilings and floors, the perspective of the halls, the mirrors of the wardrobes. Valdrada’s inhabitants know that each of their actions is, at once, that action and its mirror image …”

Venicereflection

Earth and Water were not the only elements of duality I found in Venice. There were streets where one half was stuck in the 13th century, while the other half had progressed into the 21st; there were other streets where antiquity and modernity were so intertwined that you couldn’t decide if the new had draped itself upon the old, trying to hide it, or the old had been used to decorate and enhance the new.

Venicemarket1

“A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”

Venicesquare

I had a strange dream one of those nights in Venice: I dreamed of a city that had been hit by a flood, a city where streets that once separated buildings across each other were now overflowing with water, a flood that spread from one street to another through the entire city so that what was left was a collection of half-submerged buildings. Yet – and this I found baffling in the panic of my dream – the city’s inhabitants went on with their tasks as if nothing catastrophic had happened: in place of cars I saw people using boats; bridges had sprung up to carry people over the water; and women hung clothes on lines thrown across the other side unmindful of the water below.

Clothesline1

After I awakened, I sat thinking for a long time whether this was how Venice evolved into its present form: water had once entered the city, and its inhabitants gradually built their life in and around it.

It wasn’t true, the history books said, but I thought it was a good story. Perhaps an old woman in Venice remembered this story passed on to her over generations, like a legend the historians had ignored. I intend to find out when I go there next.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Redbag

Some days back I spotted a blackbird trying different angles of approach at the yellow bag.

Blackbird

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?

Birdwithbluecrown

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)

Seeing

Last Tuesday I took the bus back from work – I normally drive or walk – and along the way, as I looked out into the street flanked by houses with snow covered rooftops, there was a flash of memory from my first days in Germany. For a moment – fleeting, but intense – I experienced a sensation I’ve almost forgotten: a mixture of awe, wonder, fear, confusion and chill I felt all at once those early days six winters ago, when I first arrived here.

Such moments are rare; the mind now finds the surroundings familiar, the eyes no longer gape in wonder, the stomach has forgotten the sensation of fear in a foreign land and the ears rarely turn pink with cold. Yet, there is something I can never get used to: the transformation of the landscape after a snowfall. All that was gray, green, brown, black, pink, purple turns into white: bare trees are covered with white streaks, as if painted by delicate strokes of a master; leaves covered with snow look like outstretched palms offering a scoop of vanilla; footprints on snow suggest a mystery, asking you to follow; streets, houses, cars, buses, entire villages, fields and mountains all blend into one form: that pure, powdery, soft, sugary substance called snow.

Bikeinsnow

* * *

Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is, among other things, about seeing. In one chapter, she speaks of a game she indulged in during childhood: “..I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone to find…..I was greatly excited at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe.” She now looks for such gifts herself:

“There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But – and this is the point – who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.”

* * *

You may have heard of The Gates in New York’s central park. If you haven’t, you can read about it here. And here. And here, here, here, here and here.

If you have heard about it all, and even seen it, you may still want to read The Gates Blog.

Whether The Gates is a work of art, or merely a modern monument glorified by many, is a debate that matters little. What matters is what The Gates has done to people. Those who had forgotten the art of seeing seem to have recovered it (The Gates to awareness?), and those who were aware and sensitive are now seeing new things, new dimensions.

Someone long ago had said: Do not mistake the description of a thing for the thing itself. And yet, there are times when the description of a thing acquires a weight of its own, perhaps greater than the thing itself, and while memory of the thing fades the power of the description grows until all that remains are words and images. The Gates will soon disappear and pass into history; one cannot say the same of its descriptions.

Random jottings

Writers often like to come up with reasons why they write. Susan Sontag, in an introduction to a collection of essays I’m currently reading, writes:

“And one becomes a writer not so much because one has something to say as because one has experienced ecstasy as a reader.”

Perhaps there are as many reasons to write as there are writers in the world.

At the German class, my fellow classmate is of a different mould. Last week, in a session where we were asked to stage a mock interview on the topic of reading habits, he answered one of my questions with the German equivalent of “I am against reading novels”.

I thought he had got it wrong in German; I suggested that to say you are against something is to imply it not only for yourself, but for everyone in general. Did he really mean that?

He said he did. He thought it a waste of time, reading works of fiction: “It takes too much time; people ought to be spending it more constructively.”

“Watching movies?” I asked. In an earlier class he had expressed his liking for popular Bollywood cinema (and at the same time conveyed his dislike for movies like “Monsoon Wedding” and “Bend it like Beckam”).

“Sure.” he replied. “It’s good entertainment, and it doesn’t take too long.”

Our German teacher was surprised too, I noted with relief. He asked if this distaste for fiction would make him keep storybooks away from his children.

“I wouldn’t encourage them to read storybooks, but if they insist I wouldn’t stop them.”

It is a language course, yes, but I also learn tolerance.

NgWe recently got the first copies (they sent the January and February editions together) of the National Geographic magazine. Late last year my wife and I decided to take up their reduced-price offer for first-time subscribers, and we had been waiting since some weeks for the yellow-bordered magazine to appear in our postbox. When it did, there was no yellow border; the magazine came wrapped in a brown envelope.

I remember being fascinated by the National Geographic since I was a child. My grandfather was a subscriber, and I spent a good part of our annual visit to his home flipping through its pages, gazing with marvel at the wonders of nature. As a teenager, I sometimes dreamed of working for the magazine, travelling to distant lands with a camera and a notebook and coming back with unforgettable pictures and mysterious stories from strange lands.

The first two editions have carried the same charm. It is also a humbling experience to contemplate the vastness and variety of our planet, and to recognize how little of it we have seen or know about. And for someone who is constantly in touch with the world of information, it is a reminder that there is a different world out there: composed not of bits and bytes but of atoms and molecules that make up our natural environment.

I have only one complaint: the magazine smells of paint, a chemical odour so strong it keeps distracting me while I read. But, I tell myself, you get used to odours in objects you love; which woman ever loved the first scent of her man?