In Which I Ask Mr Gloom To Get Lost

Today I am 44 years old. I never thought I would reach this age so soon. I always believed that time would be partial towards me and move at a leisurely pace in my case, but that was not to be and that is never going to be. Wasn't it only the other day when my father was 44?

Much of my time is spent pondering over 'wasn't-it-only-the-other-day' questions and wallowing in the gloom they induce. Gloom and I have become good friends of late, which is why, for the first time in many years, I did not throw a birthday party. I wanted to mark the passage of time in the company of my most loyal friends: the yellow lamp, the laptop, and the glass containing golden liquid. Gloom is there too, sitting right next to me, as I write these lines. He is, in fact, looking over my shoulder while I type.

Not too long ago, it was Shivani who sat in his place. She would bring me to Ganga Mail almost every other night, and seduce me into pouring out my mind. But she left one night, once she realised that I had become too busy for her, and Mr Gloom took her place. Mr Gloom has a thick skin: he stays put even when I am rude to him -- even when I ask him to get out of the house.

It is nice to have a drink with Mr Gloom once in a while: he keeps you in touch with reality. But I hate it when he inhibits my thoughts. Very often he tells me, "The subject you are going to write about is nice, all right, but what are you going to get out of it?" And so I drop the idea. This has been happening for a few years now, and in the process Ganga Mail has become orphaned.

I must find Shivani and bring her back. Mr Gloom, you can fuck off. Go find another friend.

Two Flowers From The Garden Of The 1980s

How quickly one gets used to change. After shifting home nearly a month ago, not once did I mistakenly end up in my old address, Murugesan Street, where I lived for 14 years; nor did my heart ever ache for the old home (and the lovely view of the sky its windows offered). In fact I quite like the new house, even though it's almost half the size of the old one.

The most painful aspect of the shifting, for me, was sorting the books. Pulling out nearly a 1,000 books from cartons, dusting them and wiping their covers clean and arranging them in racks by their authors -- that can be a back-breaking task. I finally accomplished this task yesterday -- on a pleasant Sunday afternoon -- and found that a single author to occupy the most space on my bookshelves is V.S. Naipaul, followed by Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Bruce Chatwin, D.H. Lawrence (in that order). But their books, put together, turned out to be in minority when I finally surveyed my entire collection, after having dusted the last book remaining in the carton.

Once the books were in place, I set about wiping clean the music CDs. I must say I have been very negligent about CDs, unlike books: I would copy the songs on my computer and leave the CDs to gather dust in some corner of the large house. I would buy CDs in Calcutta, often spending a lot of money, and forget about them upon returning to Chennai. Yesterday, while digging into the 'music' carton, I discovered a three-CD collection of Bengali songs by R.D. Burman and Asha Bhosle, titled Together. I must have bought it from Calcutta, obviously, but I do not remember when -- I certain do not remember playing the CDs before.

And so I randomly plucked CD no. 3 from the album and put it into the player, hoping to listen to some familiar songs while I cleaned the covers of other CDs with a wet cloth. One way of belonging to a new house is to have your old favourites reverberate in its air. But two songs blew my mind -- they were R.D.-Asha duets I had never heard before even though I was in possession of the album for god-alone-knows how long. And I thought I had heard everything that R.D. Burman had created!

I ended up replaying the two songs 12 times -- yes, 12 times. They changed the tempo of my Sunday. As such, there is nothing special about the songs: they are pretty run-of-the-mill and can even sound meaningless and stupid to the discerning listener, yet there was something extremely magnetic about them. They bore the signature rhythm of R.D. (much sought-after these days) and the innocence of the 1980s (also much sought-after these days) -- but at the same time sounded fresh off the recording studios.

To me, the songs were two fresh flowers plucked out of the garden of the 1980s and held under my nostrils. I wonder how they will smell to you; here they are:

1. Dak pathale kal shokale

2. Aar ki tomay chharchhi.