Random thoughts on a balmy afternoon!

As I sit re-reading Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary on this particularly balmy end-summer afternoon, I feel a sense of unmistakable peace stealing over me. I sit on my patio admiring the queer shaped cloud-monsters staring at me blatantly and observing the pattern of the sap-green hibiscus leaves. It’s beautifully quiet save for the occasional chirrup of birds, the guttural noise squirrels make, the flapping of pigeon wings and the intermittent thudding sound wafted from the carpenters’ workshop next door. Having spent the whole day reading and writing away from the hinterland of social media and cellular phone, I feel a lambent radiance slowly illuminating the hitherto dark corners of my mind riddled with the soot of future worries. Indeed, I am now convinced that when you need answers it’s best to look inside. I don’t know how many of you are in love with solitude and occasional asocial life, but I know I am. I derived the greatest pleasure today when I directed my attention toward my avocation. Writing solves problems, I am sure it does. I know sometimes it is hard to string together the thoughts; sometimes the mind is so eerily quiet that you begin to doubt. Nevertheless, you must persevere; at least that is what Virginia Woolf did. She labored from one story to another turning a conscious eye toward her art and striving her best to perfect it through experimentation and constant reading. I have always found Woolf a darling writer. I love her, and so, I love her fiction. Her often snobbish, often prudish nerd-like philosophical stance is deliciously palatable to my taste-buds. I remember getting back to this diary of hers when I was stuck with a short story a few years ago. The reading did nothing to alleviate the stifling situation, but it sure made me more confident of myself. Woolf is my panacea; and this afternoon I feel I love her more than ever. The cloud-monsters keep changing position in the sky sometimes growing grim with sudden desperation and sometime allowing the sun to permeate through them with the vim and vigor of a teenager. I see them and wonder if Woolf too had stared like me at some cumulous populated once-azure sky and indulged in wordplay. I can imagine her frail form at her desk close in her study looking out with an admiring eye at the ever-changing visage of a day. Somehow the colors seem very bright to me today. The digladiation between contradictory thoughts is conspicuous by its absence. All is calm, all is quiet. I know sometimes I let myself go on and generally give in to lugubriousness or loquaciousness without reticence, but the process of penning rambling thoughts clarifies several of my life’s puzzles for me. At the touch of self-created philosophy and under the aegis of contemplation, my thoughts sort themselves out. I think it’s going to rain this evening; I will wait for it. 

Benimadhab, Benimadhab, where art thou?

Sharing with you all an old translation done by me of Joy Goswami's Malatibala Balika Bidyalay:-)

The original poem by Joy Goswami.

My translation of the poem:

Benimadhab, Benimadhab, I want to visit your home
Benimadhab, do you still remember me? 
Benimadhab, when you played the flute of romance--
under the lush green canopy, I was a pupil at Malati School
Sitting at my desk I solved math problems in our small classroom
Outside the class our teacher alongside her groom
I was standard nine, I was sari
We met, Benimadhab, at Sulekha's home.

Benimadhab, Benimadhab, well-read and smart
When visiting from town I am but dark 
Just one glance at you and I ran to my abode
Benimadhab, my father works at a store. 
Despite it all hums the whining little bee, in the arbor blooms life decree 
And in my evening study hour I miscalculate my sums
I was standard nine, I was sweet sixteen
Clandestinely we met beside the bridge. 

Benimadhab, Benimadhab, tell me the truth
After all these years do you still remember our past?
Did you ever tell your girlfriend about us?
I saw you just once together with her
Under a light, a marvellous light
I tell you I thought you two looked smart 
The sight quenched my eyes, the sight burned my eyes
I came home and wished you good luck.

At night when I go to sleep at the basement chamber 
Silvery moon rays illuminate the bedding sheets spread on the floor
My other sister, the one younger than me, is lost in the barbed thoroughfare
She just disappeared; I don’t know with whom she now resides 
Today you have, what will happen tomorrow? Tomorrow is the devil
Nowadays I am the neighbourhood needlework tutor
Yet fire, Benimadhab, why the fire does not lit?
How will it be if I end too up being another fallen woman?

Thoughts on Re-reading Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca

On certain mornings, the composition of a thousand words—the indelible part of the self-inflicted writing routine—disgorges easily and effortlessly out of the system. It just takes a spark of a thought, an iota of an idea, and the vision of the lightest hue of the spectrum to get things going for me. On such days I cannot help but wonder if there is anything better than a life devoted to writing. The composition of these daily documents are preparatory steps gently leading me to a poem or a story perhaps, and this thought  rejuvenates the wilting soul when inspiration is remote and the long face of a long day stares at me with exasperation. It is the hope of a better creative life that might enlighten my existence some day that gets me going.

Having spent half of last night finishing Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, I feel both tired and excited this morning. The cup of steaming Dutch coffee offers refreshing assistance. I sip it and dream of Manderley. In fact, I have been dreaming of the marvelous mansion since last night. I wonder if I ever ceased thinking about it. Surely, Manderley has been nestling in my subconscious mind since the time I first read about it years ago as a naïve undergraduate student of literature. At that time, I was really close in character and personality and in my aimless juvenile ways to the nameless heroine of the novel who speaks the famous opening line of the book: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

I find the aforementioned line particularly fascinating. This simple sentence is so as thickly encrusted with deep esoteric meanings as the woods neighboring Manderley are covered with irrepressible foliage. Apart from the unforgettably witty opening lines of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, it has been Du Maurier’s Gothic romance whose first lines I never forgot. I find myself again in pursuit of the unmistakable something that paints this little line, the mysterious ingeriedent that strikes the ambiguous note of thrill. A reader can imagine things and so I did half of last night. I found myself susceptible to the eerie and cold atmosphere of mystery surrounding the book encroaching upon me with its “long, tenacious fingers;” I yielded under the pressure of its cachectic fingers.

The real heroine of the story of course is Rebecca, the dead wife of Max de Winter. Despite her death and consequent physical absence she lives on in Manderley. Manderley is a living citadel of her haunting presence. It is she and not the narrator, the second Mrs. De Winter who remained anonymous throughout the story, who steers the story along. Rebecca is conspicuous by her absence, we don’t see her but we know she is there, in Manderley. As Mrs. Danvers the frightening housemaid said she could still hear the rustle of her dress or her gentle footsteps in the hall, we too can hear Rebecca, her laugh, her voice, soft yet firm and unyielding. I feel I could close my eyes and imagine her standing in the threshold separated from me by the thick miasmic fog of death, her ectoplasm slowly generating form like a magician’s vanishing-reappearing trick working slowly, listlessly.

Having read the book in the silent hours of night under the white light of my table lamp in my own rented-castle, I found myself more sunk in the mystery. The discrepancies in the text especially the portrayal of the weak and feeble narrator has disturbed me. I didn't quite like her thinking she was a quadruped whenever her husband played with her hair and her habit of sitting at his knees. Evidently, she lacks the force of personality and her display of weakness only strengthened the already well-nourished character of the dead Mrs. de Winter. Rebecca seemed like the blood-sucking fiend who abstracted the life-blood from the nameless heroine and further weakened her. The two Mrs. de winters are binary opposites, one weak, good, morally potent; the other evil, licentious and dark-haired. Now, here we can raise several intellectual queries: first, does a woman who is free-spirited and adventurous deserves to be killed, especially when she has made her position clear to her husband upon honeymoon? Does a woman who is forceful and upright deserve to be nullified? Why did Maxim de Winter hate her; was he himself like our nameless heroine wilted and de-manned by Rebecca’s masculine adventurous ways? Seeing the story from this angle, we can safely say that Max de Winter suited the nameless feeble wife than Rebecca.

To tell you the truth, I am fascinated by Rebecca. I guess I belong to the devil’s party too. After I’ve close my book and rested in bed, it was Rebecca I tried to see and not the naïve heroine, a vignette of yester-year better forgotten. It’s she and Mrs. Danvers, the Lady Macbeth type housekeeper dressed in black who keeps Rebecca alive despite her untimely demise by keeping her quarters in the exact order as it used to be when she left, that we remember. I would say this that the somnambulistic housekeeper who finally incinerates the Manderley edifice has succeeded in keeping Rebecca alive for us; in our mind she will live her mysterious-adventurous life.

Finally, in the end, we cannot but give credit to Daphne Du Maurier for crafting this exquisite Gothic romance. The writing is excellent and effortless; you can see she was inspired the time she wrote it. So deftly she wielded the plot and placed her characters therein that you’d be left wondering at her creative potential and wishing one day, after years and years of perseverance, you too would think of something close it. Of course, it all dreams, the stuff we are made on, that cloud my eyes right now; nevertheless, I prefer to marinate myself in the salty-sustaining fluid of reverie and rest awhile in peace away from the demands of the world and its serious un-fictive ways. Building a glass palace may be a mark of weakness and escapism, but fiction always never fails in giving me the opportunity to superintend the building of one in the sprawling green grounds of my mind.

Random Thoughts On a Wednesday Morning

It is a gloomy Wednesday morning in the city of skyscrapers I call my home. The sun is invisible, hidden under extensive sheets of cloud that shapelessly and starkly embroider the firmament. Seeing it now you would not even guess its watchet past, its wooly cloud infested corpus stretched taut over a happy looking green earth.

I have often found myself gloating on the atmosphere and the colors of the day: the greens unleash creative thoughts, the blue vintage memoirs; I find brown sanctimonious and grey difficult to interpret. A cool breeze playing on my face during an evening walk makes me stop and savor the sweetness of those balmy fingertips. As I abstract myself from virtual reality and delve into the indwelling actuality of the world, I feel more real myself. There is no cooked-up happy thought to allay my disturbed senses; when pain comes I must accept it as frequently occurring episode. For days I have been following the news of the great deluge that unleashed havoc in Uttarkhand. Having once visited the shrine myself as a young lady, I feel the mayhem of nature as something too emotionally disturbing  to handle. The sight of the corpses inside the peaceful temple, the sight of death in such close conjunction with impressive natural beauty, surprised me. I still remember how apprehensive I was of climbing the steep terrain that led me to Kedarnath, for the road is unpropitious and even dangerous. I can still see the silvery river snaking at the foot of the hill, the same river otherwise calm that has burst into deathly activity like some dormant volcano coming to life. Maybe nature too has a breaking point; may be it too reaches that stage when the elastic band gives out and there is a tear. The country steeped in corruption and crime, the environment reaped off its milk and rendered scarred and marred by human hands may have caused even the gentle sleeping god to awake and dance his dance of death and destruction. This is a purely romantic view, I know, but not being an atheist or an agnostic, I am prepared to consider all possibilities—logical and illogical.

The video footage flashing on television news channels of two-storied buildings crumbling like a house of cards remind of Dan Brown’s Inferno, a text I just finished reading. The antihero of the piece is bent on relieving the earth of its surplus population. But we don’t approve of such arbitrary excision, such amputation of human life on a massive scale. I wish we could communicate with the supramundane agency and ask it to rear life not unleash death and suffering. 

My readings of Renaissance literature have made me regard, though momentarily, Sir. Thomas More’s Utopia as a thing possible; who knows, I say myself, in some future time may be we can have a perfect country with a benevolent government unheeding to discrimination. But Utopia means nowhere; and discrimination is all we see nowadays—Paula Deen’s racist ideology is a living proof of that. I never believed that Mrs. Deen, whose cooking show I so enjoyed, would turn out to be a racist Southerner. The mask of forced pleasantry being pulled off, I now see her as an ugly white lady devoid of compassion. I always think literature makes you compassionate and in this world where disillusionment is inevitable, literature (fiction) gives us a temporary womb to rest before we are thrown out into the horrible real world, so to speak.

As we dwell this morning in my random thoughts un-clocked by the grey looking sky and these tall buildings with tapering heads reaching for it like the leafless emaciated fingers of branch reaching up in desperation. The daily thousand-word routine being the first thing I tackle every morning, I get to see the myriad emotions of the mind lying bare every day. On some mornings, gaiety is profound, and on certain days all I discern is despondency.

As I vacillate between the extremes, I see the virtual papyrus slowly getting populated with words, one word after another forming a sentence, one sentence after another leading to a paragraph, and so on. And however much incoherent and meaningless the word-structure strikes, I am never induced to erase them. I feel close to these words, a sort of invisible umbilical attachment connects me to them that prevent me from destroying them. In my own little world of words I act like a minor goddess refusing to accept the truth of death and deletion.

Reading my random free-written thoughts one may laugh and doubt my sanity, but I wonder if not sanity is overestimated. Come to think of it, are we all sane? A deconstruction of the term sanity will lead us to a labyrinth of significations none of them correct in totality, and finally, to a den of aimlessness when we must give up our quest altogether. Such heavy thought on a breakfast bereft stomach is painful for me. I must get back to contemplation after the nourishment of the day is partaken. I totally believe in Virginia Woolf’s words that one “cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” The intellectual Woolf must have got this right, she being a great cook herself. I remember reading an article somewhere about Woolf’s cooking and how wielding the skillet made her happy. We all have our little pleasures, those activities that give us incessant happiness and make us forget all that’s wrong and ugly in the world. Call it escapism, but it surely has its merit. For me this little activity of free-writing every morning, gardening and decorating my home form a triad of happy exercises  Reading and cooking are extended arms of this triad that help too.

I look at the clock and see my hour of writing is slowly reaching its finale. The day stretches before me like the desert with things-to-do rippling before my eyes like the illusory vision of an oasis. So, I bid you all adieu and hope you all have a good day! Here is one of my favorite poems for you to enjoy:

Welcome Morning

by Anne Sexton

There is joy

in all:

in the hair I brush each morning,

in the Cannon towel, newly washed,

that I rub my body with each morning,

in the chapel of eggs I cook

each morning,

in the outcry from the kettle

that heats my coffee

each morning,

in the spoon and the chair

that cry "hello there, Anne"

each morning,

in the godhead of the table

that I set my silver, plate, cup upon

each morning.

All this is God,

right here in my pea-green house

each morning

and I mean,

though often forget,

to give thanks,

to faint down by the kitchen table

in a prayer of rejoicing

as the holy birds at the kitchen window

peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,

let me paint a thank-you on my palm

for this God, this laughter of the morning,

lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,

dies young.

New Publication in Mused-- Bella Online Literary Review

Read my latest publication in the esteemed literary journal, Mused Bella Online Literary Review:
http://www.bellaonline.com/review/issues/summer2013/