Prashant's Solace

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;    Thus unlamented let me die; Steal from the world, and not a stone Tell where I lie.                                   -  Alexander Pope  There once lived a man named He. He was also referred to as Him.  He lived in one of the most remote parts of a country.  A non-existential place, amidst existence. Nothing travelled to this place. Not even news. Nothing significant happened here, good or bad. When one of the natives left for the nearest town, there would be a cry fest. It was nothing short of seeing off a soldier leaving for the battlefield. And the person would be only a little more than an hour's distance away! So, He grew up in this setting in a joint household with a river for a backyard. The only lives people knew of here, were their own. Everything required for living was obtained from the weekly market....

On a dull Leicester street, a group of men have been congregating since morning. The sentiments were sombre although mingled with some respite and a lot of confusion. Someone was lost but someone survived. Hundreds of miles across the globe, curfew was relaxed in Thoubal town, a sharp feature in the bend of the Himalayas. A group of women in distress, frantically searched the family albums for what has been lost for ever. The thread connecting the two events – a tragic plane crash. Source: Getty Images A curious if not voyeuristic reaction is to demand more of the above scenes. But there are more such events unravelling every passing second. Only, sometimes has become often. You work towards a certain goal, an aspiration, an idea of happiness, a pursuit of excellence or a unity of souls, as in the case of a couple about to restart a life of togetherness with their kids after an enforced separation. But calamity strikes, strikes the good and the bad equally. You walk out in the mo...

(This is a humble attempt to mimic my childhood hero's writing style. Guess who?) I can smell the earth. The breeze is gentle and soothing this afternoon. The wind chimes from Bindra’s fuels the composing environment. The tropical quartet of the warbler, the ashy prinia, a koel & magpies out on the neem tree are all clamour today.  Many years ago, Kausalya, our former maid, had planted it as a house-warming gift. It still remains the best gift we have ever received.  In stark contrast to this is the environment this side of my French window. The rain clouds have dimmed the lights in the room. My book shelf, which usually holds my eyes up, fails to cheer me up. The books look like they need rest from resting.  Back outdoors, the weight of grey sky seems too heavy on earth. My sleepy street, in my not so sleepy town, is quieter than usual. Rarely a vehicle goes by to evidence any human presence. The birds, wind chimes, the breeze and the neem tree render the atmo...

It has been twenty-four years since she’d last seen it, but the place looked exactly the same. To her, maybe. Time moved in contexts as waves, Ruhi decided. Each wave displaces the previous one. Yet, there are some people who live in the flux of things. Her two maternal uncles occupied the first and the third house on the front lane of Dwarka Nagar or the Gateway (to Heaven) City. The cemetery masking it from the road lent its name to the colony. Gateway to Heaven hid many such families behind its walls. The two houses were single-room dwellings, housing multiple members, as did the others in the colony. Ruhi could see through the front door, out through the back one, into the lane behind, and on a bright day, she could even wave and talk to someone on the third lane through the second lane house.  In deference to architectural decorum let us refer to these houses as rooms. Grandparents, two Uncles, one of whom was married bearing her a cousin and temporary residents like her ...

Ansh looked out of his window seat. He could see the gathering grey war clouds. Somewhere behind those clouds were enemy planes, lingering drones waiting to engage him or evade him. On the other side of the aisle, a middle-aged lady was reciting her nauseous prayers. Out from her side of the window, were snowy clouds carrying civilian planes bound for homes everywhere in his country. He thought of floating out of the flight, over the western sky and seeing everything usual. The desert and the farms, the tense communal situation across the panorama, the bright IPL match lights glowing in one of the cities. More often than not, his thoughts placed him elsewhere from his location. From a cosy ambience, 31,000 ft. above the border of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, he drifted to 2010, in a shadowy basement in Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar. As he walked in the narrow corridor, he could hear Ajay Sir’s voice, making him the late arrival. Usually, Sir was never on time and they all waited for...

One night in my dream I came face to face with evil. It told me to think for myself, take decisions based on my understanding of the world. It told me to think critically, analyse objectively and trust my instincts even if they go against the ways of the world.  It talked to me about existential crisis, new recourses, breaking of fundamentals of living in order to create new realities. It talked about voyeuristic pursuit of self-actualization and the horrendousness of not knowing everything.  But thankfully, I woke up and I reaffirmed to myself…  One is born into. One cannot choose. I was born in a village, a community, a caste, a religion, a country. All around me were perfunctory motions of life. From before birth till after death, my life was to be enacted in a certain way. Everything was figured out by all the above combinations, unlike what evil suggested.  From morning till night, night after night, day after day, I come across happy and sad occasions. ...

The picture below is one of many disappearing stories. What is a story? The one which is told or the one which is written, the one which is sung or the one which is enacted. What about those which are neither told nor written, simply play out there and cease to exist? But one hot day... The water cans in this picture were provided to these labourers by my house. These are not people employed by us but construction workers on a road site. Meaning a government contractor brought them in my lane for work and left them there for good. It is the end of the day; you can see life and work partners are getting into the auto rickshaw, after a hard day's labour. Their kids are already lodged behind the seat in semi-dazed condition. The woman folk are getting in, well-aware their day's work is not yet over. They have to go back to their ramshackle existence, cook and feed all, service the elders and later maybe their husbands. But the cans. They had come running on being told by my passin...

A friend once told me with disdain. ‘I think fiction books are stupid. Stories about love, hate and all the… stupidities. I only read non-fiction, the real deal.’ He announced why reading fiction is one of the guilty pleasures that humanity indulges in and we are better off without it. And he wasn’t the first one to tell me this. The Onslaught  Many of my students and parents come to me declaring the usefulness of certain works and subjects. They talk of the useless pursuits - story subjects, which I should rather neglect while teaching. Some are willing to concede a little ground. According to them, while these stories might be a good 'time-pass', they might not land their kids a good career, a good social standing or a good job. While it is good to patronise them, these storybooks do not mean anything in the real world. Maybe one can read them for a couple of hours in a week, if at all.  But no one is going to employ them or marry them for reading storybooks. Some ar...

There he was again. Amidst life on earth, a speck of dust, a blip, a grain of sand. The kulfiwallah walks into the street like he had countless times before. The same soft jingle, the same rectangular arch, hoisting the name of his moving establishment over a black pot draped with a red cloth. He looks the same. No. He looks the same! He keeps coming from an unknown place and disappearing down the street each evening only to reappear the next day. Day in, day out. Times, mutinies, 09/11, 26/11, economic meltdowns, World Cup victories, marriages, divorces, deaths, births, careers, pandemics, growths, developments, regressions, governments; nothing seems to affect him. 30 years on, he looks the same. The pace of his cart is the same and of course the taste of that perpetual kulfi is the same.  About 25 years ago, a game of lingorcha was being played on the same street. It was March, the middle of the exam season. But this boy couldn’t care less. He wasn’t the one to study till the ...