Wien Mitte

Notes from an evening in Vienna, some time in April 2017, my first time in Europe.

I heard some music when I walked down the busy streets of the city centre in Vienna, from Stephansplatz towards the Vienna State Opera. At a corner, I witnessed two women, playing violin and flute, making some passers-by stop to listen but not too many. A little further ahead, a woman and a man were playing the violin, their music melancholic; quite a few people stopped by to listen to them. I stopped too and listened to the music and watched people listen to the music and then I walked on, afraid that I would be stuck in that part of the street for quite a while and won’t get to see what lay ahead. After all, I was in the city for just three evenings and the next two would be taken up socializing with other physicists and their casual causal ruminations.

The music was gradually fading away in the background as I walked on and before the music was lost, I witnessed a man almost in the middle of the street corner by a pole, his head bowed in meek submission as he knelt on the floor, hands open to anything the odd passer-by might offer but not really saying a word, his dog sleeping a most peaceful sleep next to him. I don’t know if it was something about the music or something about the mood I was in, but I felt I should go talk to the man, but I stopped myself from doing that when I realized that I did not speak German and perhaps I would only disappoint the man – and myself – if I tried to talk to him. I reluctantly walked past him, unsure of myself.

A few metres down the street, traces of the music could still be heard, but then I turned around to go check on that man again. Perhaps it wasn’t so much the man, but the spectacle of seeing him bowed like that in the middle of the street that attracted me to that spot. I found it visually arresting. And then it happened. I saw what I think was a perfect moment for street photography, the sort of moment that’s an unlikely coming together of elements that compose award-winning pictures. Across the street, opposite this man bowed in submission, was a bench, and when I passed by this bench – not in between the man and the bench, but behind the bench – I saw two lovers sitting there, lost in their togetherness, oblivious to this man right in front of them or the world generally. I saw them kiss, and through the spaces between them, just beneath their lips locked in a kiss, I saw the image of this man opposite them, head bowed, hands outstretched on the floor. As if he was longing not for money or food per se, but love. I couldn’t bring myself to take out the phone and snap a picture but that fleeting image stayed in my visual memory rather than being consigned to a jpeg file.

I turned back again towards the Opera and saw people seated by the side of the street looking at the giant screen displaying a live feed of the opera going on inside. I did not understand much of it, but I stood there for a while before moving on. On my way back, I asked a street-side vendor if he had any kebabs I could eat and he said yes and went about the business of making one when I interrupted to check if he accepted cards. I mumbled something like “No cash, only card”, at which he grew alarmed. He did not speak much, but only said, “No money, no kebab!” And I had to go on my way, wordless, kebabless.

I also bought an ice cream without a word of English. I saw an old man and two women by his side all gregarious and laughing under the open skies, it made me happy. I wanted to visit Boltzmann’s grave but it was too late to say hello.

The light falls lightly in Chicago

The light falls lightly in Chicago, mellowed

By the clouds ever-shifting under the spell of the windy city, and

The leaves leave a shadow so pale,

With an almost-thereness typical of a sky

Unsure of itself,

Of whether to let the light through, or to let it rain,

Of whether to let the folks out on the streets basking in the sunshine,

Walking in unison, all coaches of a train,

Or whether to let the clouds be themselves, whether to let them rain.

 

Sitting here by the riverside,

I try to revive words long lost to the river of being and becoming,

Words that drowned in the river, or so I thought,

Really, they were only trying to go deeper.

Their surface-level pandiculation had made them seem tired,

Not-yet-ready for the day, for truth.

I am just trying to retrieve them from the river,

To see if they have plumbed the depths to find all that was lost, and not.

But my metaphors seem tired too,

So maybe the words are not yet ready

To leave the river.

 

Children sitting by the banks of the river,

Their feet dangling,

Unafraid of the depths,

They speculate how deep the river might be.

I dare not dangle my feet like that,

Is that the difference between thirteen and thirty?

Maybe they are better prepared for the depths than me.

Michelle from Green Mill

 

“Marvellous Ms. Michelle”, I said.

A slip of the tongue, or of the brain.

I wondered why I thought of her again.

No, not Michelle from Green Mill,

But Michelle from Tinder.

The Michelle of many words,

All written, none spoken.

The Michelle of stories,

Trapper of the ‘lestjun’.

The Michelle who ice-skated for the first time as a girl,

But the skates gave up on her.

Her most memorable date was on an ice rink,

And no, it wasn’t with me.

In fact,

I have never met Michelle.

Michelle is not real,

Or at least not bothered enough to become real to me,

She just lives in my phone.

She writes with her left hand

And always gets glittery graphite on the side of her palm

When writing an exam.

She says we might run into each other,

Possibly on a bus.

She has even dreamt it.

 

Sometimes I would call her the “Marvellous Ms. Michelle”,

The Green Mill reminded me of the ‘Gaslight’ and of ‘Marvellous Mrs. Maisel’,

Except the washroom was on the wrong side.

The Green Mill is where I met Michelle.

No, not the one from my phone,

Just the one from Green Mill,

The one I did not know

But whose joie de vivre moved something in me.

She had a big old camera,

She took pictures (obviously),

And she frequented the place often.

We talked of jokes and of punchlines,

How anything can be a punchline

If you just work on the set-up,

Except sometimes one gets so lost in the set-up

That the punchline is nowhere to be found.

You get my drift?

 

Anyway, the next day

I went for brunch at the Signature Room on top of Hancock tower,

Thinking of Michelle

Who suggested we go there, Anusha and I.

But Anusha was asleep, so I went in memoriam

Of Michelle from Green Mill.

Not Michelle from Shopper’s Drug Mart,

The medical research assistant Michelle,

Not the Michelle of the stage.

She said they — her and Joseph — will come,

But I doubt they will

To my poetry reading

About Michelle from Green Mill.

the banyan of life

(Continued from two solitudes in their togetherness)

Who knew where the flycatcher flew

The morning light peeked in through his window, almost unsure whether to wake him up. In the middle of a dream, he did not want to wake up either. His tired words seemed to have carried some meaning to her after all. She came to see him. They talked in that dream, after a long time, under the shade of the banyan that had seen their solitudes grow into an unfinished togetherness that they were now leaving behind them. The conversation had reached a happy place and he was almost ready to wake up, naively hoping his dream world would merge with the real world when he opened his eyes. Somewhere along the passage from one world to another he realized the fallacy of the hope with which he was going to wake up. And to protect himself from the disappointment that stems from impossible dreams one holds too dear, he tried to continue sleeping. Some other, more ridiculous, dreams would hopefully take over and he would not long for them after he opened his eyes. That did not happen. Instead, he woke up with a longing that would be a lot more bearable if it weren’t burdened by his love. All he could do was to put pen to paper, continuing the conversation from under the banyan, almost hoping she could still hear him whisper in the carefully punctuated spaces between pen and paper:

I am sorry I wasn’t there for you in your most difficult moments and that you couldn’t tell me how you felt, that I didn’t read it all myself, glossing over everything and weakening our love. I realize that love, as life, must be a constant improv, rather than a fixed recipe handed down by some master chef, or a routine thing to be taken for granted until it withers in our hearts. We must constantly tend to it, as one tends to a sapling that’s just beginning to spread its roots, and we must never stop doing that, not even when the sapling turns into a beautiful tree that can withstand the elements. There are lessons we learned in our time together as lovers which I hope will keep us company as we figure our way along life’s maze, finding our way to a place that isn’t yet a place. I also hope that we find in ourselves the strength and wisdom to improv to life in a new way, that we may love each other differently this time, as friends, and that this friendship is not a thing to be seen as a diminished form of what used to be our love, but a thing in its own right; not something salvaged from our relationship as lovers, but a thing built upon the togetherness we once shared, one that’s falling off like leaves in autumn right now, but only to enrich the earth which only gives; and in which we must trust to provide a fertile ground for our growth. This love, founded in friendship, is a different aerial root of the banyan of life, finding its way to the earth, seeking to find a footing in the truth of the soil, so that one day it doesn’t matter where the “main” trunk of the tree is; what matters is that the tree is a forest, a life-affirming ecosystem in its own right, just like the Adyar banyan we once sat under. I hope that our friendship finds its way to the earth and stays rooted in it for a long time to come, that we meet again in this forest under the banyan of life, regaling each other with tales we lived through away from this banyan, and that we find that paradise flycatcher again when we come back. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

He thought about what he had just written and whether it was anything more than a bunch of platitudes strung together to make what is difficult seem easy: self-indulgent prose that doesn’t help anyone. Maybe he was just storytelling his way out of troublesome feelings and his own past. But isn’t that the usual task of being human, coming up with stories that comfort us, that “fit”? Except that, usually, these stories are told from a distant future that one isn’t ready to inhabit just yet. He considered the thought for a moment but then decided that these words should reach her, if only so she knows where to find him when the time comes. He found an envelope, placed the note in it, affixed the necessary stamps, and sent those words on their journey across the ocean that separated them.

When she received his note, she filed it away with the rest of his letters. She was surprised how much she still enjoyed reading him. She wondered if it was even possible for them to meet again under that banyan, if that wouldn’t just bring back difficult feelings. She certainly couldn’t promise him anything. Besides, she found herself sharing her cup of loneliness with someone else now.

She noticed her phone still had ‘life is an improv’ on the home screen but she wasn’t sure of that any more.

two solitudes in their togetherness

(Continued from her cup of loneliness)

She picked up Rilke’s letters to a young poet, which he had shared with her a long time ago, and her fingers tried to feel for the words on a page that read:

the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.

Except their solitudes did not greet each other any more. She had been working on hers, and he on his, quite apart from each other.

Absorbed in his newfound scent of solitude, he went to sleep, continuing a piece he had left unfinished, picking up from where they left off the last time he met her in a dream. He wrote to her:

***

You complained the other day that I do not write any more, you said that you wished I would write, that the words you found here made you fall in love and that you check if I have penned anything new every now and then, just in case I have managed to write something that can once again make you feel that way. I don’t know if I can, just as I didn’t know if I could when you did read some words strung together and left out to dry in this worldwide web of dreams and indulgences. What I can do, perhaps, is to break the odd silence that has gripped this space between us, so that it may once again carry words the way it used to, that once again the conditions for such carriage are not beholden to the gravity of the business of everyday life outside of this web that holds us together.

Will my words be able to resist this gravity though?

Will they make their escape from this heaviness not of their choosing and soar majestically in all their lightness, making the skies their own?

Or will they stop resisting these realities and burrow deep into them, tilling the soil of muddled thoughts and making stories of the earth their own?

Am I an eagle or an earthworm?

To be too busy with life to put words to any of it is both good and bad, and for the same reason: one is too busy living, too mired in the grand indulgence of it all, to talk about life or draw any inferences on meaning and purpose, or their absence for that matter. Even if it’s in a dream. When indulgence takes over, meaning’s not needed. Until the indulgences fade away and meaning is once again sought, if not in then through words. Yet I can’t seem to trust my words enough with the meaning I want them to carry, or when I do, it doesn’t seem quite worth it, because the words shrug and seem tired and unwilling to wield the burden of meaning. Yet some of us are doomed to search for meaning, even if our search for meaning is doomed. Words are not the only means to that meaning, but I suppose they will have to do for now. I can’t touch or hold you, after all.

I tell them again, that it’s you this time, that they should help me woo you back again. They say it’s not their job. They think they don’t need to do that anyway, that you aren’t quite done with me, and that there is still a lot of room for new meaning between us, if only so we feel less of an indulgence to each other. Not that that’s a bad thing, indulgence. I am largely a materialist, philosophically speaking, and this materialism sometimes spills over from philosophy to practice, often unwittingly. I am not sure what I am on about here, but it doesn’t matter, for it’s my erratic train of thought and its unpredictable stops that you love, you said. So let’s take it from there. My train of thought often gets derailed because it ventures into spaces where there are no tracks.

It’s coming your way, though, this train of thought ferrying an unreserved affection I have often neglected to send your way, sometimes because I am afraid it will morph into a cheesy hackneyed thing. And sometimes because I am awake. It’s a strange place, this train, for people hop on and off at will and there’s nothing I can do to make them come in or stay on as we meander our way through life’s trackless expanse.

***

She slept under the starlit sky that night, pondering Rilke’s words to the young poet, and wondering if Rilke missed something in his letters. He spoke of two solitudes, and the fallacy of a coming together of two people who “can no longer tell whose outlines are whose”, but he said nothing of the hard work of togetherness, that goes beyond bordering and protecting and greeting each other to discovering, and nurturing, a bond that is only meaningful — and unique to — the two solitudes in their togetherness. That two solitudes could share a togetherness sounded like a contradiction to her. But then she felt that words have their limitations, that they can’t always wield the burden of meaning one wants them to carry. She felt she had read that somewhere, but she wasn’t sure.

Two solitudes in their togetherness made perfect sense.

Made for each other

You know what hurts?

When my Nostalgia meets your Amnesia

And they get along so well!

Nostalgia has an expiry date, at least for one of us.

I remember; you don’t.

Your Amnesia and my Nostalgia,

they are made for each other.

Notes to Madras things: Thayir Sadam

Dear Thayir Sadam,

I remember the day we first met. It was my second visit to Madras, this time for a PhD interview at IMSc.* My train was late that day. I was dripping with sweat when I landed at Central and made my way hurriedly to the Park Town station. I remember I asked a girl called Mahi for directions at the station. Even though I don’t remember what she looked like I somehow remember her name from the brief conversation that followed until the train arrived. I managed to reach IMSc and finished the interview just before lunch time. I was told I could have lunch at the canteen and that it was free and that I would also be able to collect my reimbursement for travel the same day. I went to the canteen and piled up everything in the menu on my plate. You were the last one I saw along the row of rice, roti/dosa, sabzi, sambhar, rasam, and my eyes brightened at the sight of you. You were pristine white with a generous helping of grapes and other fruits mixed with rice. I immediately filled the emptiness in a corner of my plate with your sublime glow. I ate for a long time, finished everything on the plate, and saved you for the end. By then I was hungry no more, but I figured I could always make space for you in some corner of my bloated belly. That first time we came together, I took a spoonful of you into my mouth. And I have to say I am sorry I used a spoon, I did not really know you then. I was revolted at the taste of you and instinctively spat you out. You were not who I thought you were: Kheer.

I later joined IMSc and kept my distance from you for almost a year, despite seeing you everyday patiently waiting in a corner in your unassuming manner. I did not think about you much then because I felt cheated. You looked like kheer but you were just rice and curd mixed together with a sprinkling of fruit pieces. I had never liked mixing my rice with curd even at home. Everyone at home could do that, not me, not usually anyway. I can’t recollect the exact moment our reconciliation happened but I think it was on a day when nothing on the menu was palatable to me and I was getting bored of eating rice at lunch everyday. Not that I mind rice, I prefer it to roti but it gets boring without some companion other than yellow daal or sambhar or rasam. And there you were in a corner, full of rice but also your own person. I decided to embrace you once again, this time with the sound knowledge that you were not Kheer, and with a bit of mixing with a little pickle, I found you were more than just curd and rice. You were so much more than the sum of your parts and the names people called you. Your tangy sensuousness with the pickle was unmatched by anything I had ever known. You did not need to be Kheer, you were defiantly original, and you did not need my approval. I could tell it from the scores of people I saw everyday mingling their fingers with your being, exploring your interiority, before plopping a mouthful on their tongues.

I am sorry, though, that I used a spoon, that I let the coldness of stainless steel get in between the warmth of us coming together. My not using my fingers had nothing to do with you, it was all me. I used a spoon with you for historical reasons. As a child I grew up eating rice with my hand, my right hand. But I was born a left-hander and had been taught to switch to the right hand for writing and eating. I could even dig up a picture of me, evidence enough that I used my left hand to eat when I was really young and before I had to learn any “manners” and switch to right-handed ways. Anyway, I grew up eating with my right hand. Then one day I think I revealed to my mother that in the potty I used my right hand, which was natural to me because I needed the left to hold the mug. She couldn’t believe me and I couldn’t believe her. I always thought everyone uses their right hand. Turns out, not so. The left hand is “dirty” and suddenly the aversion to left hand everywhere became clear to me. I had never thought of it before but in that moment I decided I should not be eating with my hands any more and use a spoon instead. This, despite the fact that I switched hands in the potty also, yet another adjustment to the ways of the world. And that eating-with-spoon habit has stayed whenever a spoon is in sight. So you see, it wasn’t you, it was all me. I have since tried to fix that mistake by using my fingers on occasion.

The time is near when I shall leave Madras and I write this to let you know what you have meant to me. You have been the steadfast companion when I hated everything else on the menu, particularly the days they made a brinjal sabzi with its atrocious smell. You are not sweet but I like you just the same. Maybe I can even learn to mix curd with my rice and mingle them up with my fingers in your memory.

Yours,

R

*The first had been three years earlier, that time for admission to a mechanical engineering program, which I did not eventually take up (becoming a physicist instead).

betta fish

she spoke of a betta fish,

something about how as a kid she thought

she once killed the fish, accidentally.

but the fish survived.

she didn’t know why people

did not talk to each other any more.

i knew i wanted to talk to her when she said that,

just to prove her wrong,

but i didn’t.

i proved her right.

broken tales from an enchanted prisoner of the dark

I am chasing away my shadow, or is it my shadow chasing me away? We never really talk, my shadow and I. The silence we share is one of incomprehension, neither of us understands the other, yet we are bound together unless we free ourselves from our captor, this light.

We run, dreaming of deliverance in the dark, where we don’t see each other. The night’s an enchantress and I, an enchanted prisoner of the dark. Unburdened by light, I ride into the night, into its open arms.

A bus stop, new and shiny, seats in rows of 4,5, and 6. I sit there before midnight, and usher in the moment of a nation’s tryst with its destiny, without meaning to. There’s the usual caravan of lights, red and yellow and blue. An awkward little slipper, once a petite woman’s right foot’s guard, lay abandoned in a puddle. Perhaps she was rushing into a bus, and lost her slipper while climbing in, wading through the rush. Or a Cinderella perhaps?

*****

She would ‘light’ up, facing the breeze. I don’t smoke, but I’d struggle too, helping her find the ‘light’. Not that that helped anyone.

I am on a treasure hunt, out and about in the night, hunting for poetry in the dark, chasing buses and shared autos, soaking spirits in the rains. It’s time I wade my way through the puddles the rains left, but the roads, once potholed, I now see are fixed and smooth. There are no puddles to wade through.

*****

The djinns are never far away, though, even in faraway places. We talked to them, and they said they are lonely, and that they would appreciate some company. So we stayed, went to Tim’s, chatted over coffee and hot chocolate. We rode into the night. We chased away the light.

I am tired. Will the night sing me a lullaby, and take me into dreams? Preferably someone else’s.

Notes from the maple leaf country

September 2013–January 2014

Autumn, the season of parting, of letting go. The North American autumn is a spectacle, no doubt about that. For about a month I had been living in the particularly verdant neighbourhood of Perimeter Institute (PI), in love with the morning/midnight walks back and forth, along Laurel Trail, between my room and office. In the morning, I’d usually be running late for breakfast at what they call the ‘Black Hole Bistro’, often making it just in time before breakfast would end. This weekend, though, I have moved to a different apartment, one that’s closer but the walk to PI isn’t as lovely as it was from the last one, a University of Waterloo accommodation.

***

In any case, winter is here, and even as they celebrate Diwali back home, I am up rather early after accidentally dozing off while reading a paper last night. The view from the window, a starry winter sky, moved me enough to want to come back to this journal of sorts and make amends for the lack of any updates these past few months. Mostly, I’ve been occupied with work, and mostly I have abandoned the thought every time I have felt like writing something here. Impulse, and that other thing, perhaps wistfulness, move me to write and preserve something of the moment before letting it go.

***

PI has been fantastic so far, a stimulating feast of coffee and conversations over things quantum and otherwise, and a place I have come to like for its vibrancy. I had a chance to play with an original World War II German Enigma machine that James Grime had brought along and gave a talk about, a chance to mess with a ‘robothespian’ and play with arrangements of prisms that distort light enough to make objects invisible.

***

I have been in Waterloo for over three months now and in less than a month I’ll return from this wintry wonderland to the sunshine and the sea, to Chennai. It has been a gratifying visit in ways more than one.

August 2014–December 2014

Living as if you’re always leaving

I am reminded of a chance remark by a friend, Farbod, about his house that I heard on a winter night when a bunch of us were saying our goodbyes after having tea. He remarked that he lived as if he was always leaving, which explained the blank walls in the house, their lack of art.

[I forgot to make enough notes, or at least to transcribe them here. But this one sums up my current “living as if I am always leaving” phase too, as I am sure it does so for a lot of others out there.]

August 2015

It’s a threepeat!

[I write this during a particularly long layover at Frankfurt, which made me return to drafts lying on this blog for months and years.]