Stories from the sea

Father And Child by William Butler Yeats

She hears me strike the board and say
That she is under ban
Of all good men and women,
Being mentioned with a man
That has the worst of all bad names;
And thereupon replies
That his hair is beautiful,
Cold as the March wind his eyes.

A Tale by Louise Bogan

This youth too long has heard the break
Of waters in a land of change.
He goes to see what suns can make
From soil more indurate and strange.

He cuts what holds his days together
And shuts him in, as lock on lock:
The arrowed vane announcing weather,
The tripping racket of a clock;

Seeking, I think, a light that waits
Still as a lamp upon a shelf, —
A land with hills like rocky gates
Where no sea leaps upon itself.

But he will find that nothing dares
To be enduring, save where, south
Of hidden deserts, torn fire glares
On beauty with a rusted mouth, —

Where something dreadful and another
Look quietly upon each other.


Behind, perhaps, let the sea blow… by Carlos Barbarito

Behind, perhaps, let the sea blow.
Let some word blow
outside every destination of slime, rust.
Perhaps ointments from Avicenna,
forests of embraces,
crops, swarms, humid implications.
Or, perhaps, the same.
It sits up. It gets dressed. It goes.
The grass stands up again.
At his step everything seems to find
inside itself a certain form of calm.
It can’t be a great distance
- he thought.

© translation: Brian Cole

Unanswered

“The girls these days are so aggressive. You should see some of the girls in my office. Sometimes even I get scared of them.” Ends with a laugh.

His words have stayed with you. And whenever you recount that meeting it seems as if we all were present too. That flat in Vasant Kunj, you emphasize Vasant Kunj as if it adds a new layer to the entire incident, the Delhi summer, you fresh out of college, and the man, not nearly as old as your father but old enough to be our uncle. Each of us has a distinct image of the man. The man who spoke these words nearly 15 years ago. Though each image reflects our distinct perspective on what these words meant. Over the years, and in part due to your constant retelling of the incident, the words have taken on varied meanings. Even your response to them attains greater depth with each passing day. Your silence; that legendary silence imbued with something so solid and grave that the only appropriate reaction seems to be discomfort followed by a strange feeling of foolishness and even shame. The silence that has been the undoing of many a formidable soul.

It isn’t the man but his words that have stayed with you and with us. And we often wonder about that. Did we find the words ‘girls’ and ‘aggressive’ in the same sentence offensive? Was it even offensive? What did it mean to a girl fresh out of college to be told about aggressive girls scaring middle aged men? Were you afraid that you weren’t aggressive enough? The last question comes up almost involuntarily for we all know only too well how vicious your silence can be. And so the recounting and the deconstructing carry on well into the night. Till the point when we couldn’t care less for middle aged men, aggressive girls and even words, their meanings and intent.

But when everyone rails against men, attitudes and words, I only watch you. And every time, at every retelling, I wonder about the other man in the room. The one we never discuss. The man who sat on the cane chair right next to you. The man well past his middle age, the man who is your father. And sometimes I wonder is it because he bore witness that these words have stayed with you. But more often than that I smile thinking about fathers who take their willful daughters to meet middle aged men scared of aggressive young girls.

The Good Daughter

When people timidly proffered banal opinions about good and evil. Sometimes gathering enough courage to quote from Richard Bach or Reader's Digest. Expounding more clichés than one’s brain can consume in a lifetime. A cacophony of mindlessly droning human voices going on and on about nothing. In that summer before our last year in college you gifted me ‘Summer in Algiers’ by Albert Camus. You said I’d like it. I knew about Camus, had read about Camus but had never felt it essential to read a single word of what he wrote. But that is what after school education does to you in India. You know everything related to the subject except the subject itself.

And you were correct. I loved the essay. I loved the vivid description of the people and the place, almost real, mostly nostalgic like some faded Polaroid. For days I ruminated over, “…Algiers (together with certain other privileged places such as cities on the sea) opens to the sky like a mouth or a wound. In Algiers one loves the commonplace: the sea at the end of the street, a certain volume of sunlight, the beauty of the race. And, as always, in that unashamed offering there is a secret fragrance. In Paris it is possible to be homesick for space and a beating of wings. Here, at least, man is gratified in every wish and, sure of his desires, can at last measure his possessions.” And I ruminated over what it was like to know. To have knowledge that comes from direct experience, knowledge that is ‘sure of its desire’, and knowledge that is lucid - self-expressed.

Just like today I ruminate over you and the books and thoughts we shared. And wonder how you are. Hoping you have managed to come away unscathed with your intellect preserved. Though somewhere in my mind a tiny voice offers some nameless misgivings. And when I look back to that and other such terrible summers in Delhi I can’t help but wonder how did you manage it even then. You, who could quote from Plato and Nietzsche, stuck in a quagmire of familial ambitions squeezing every last bit of oxygen; making all the books and quotes fall lifeless. Become meaningless. Feel homesick for space and a beating of wings.

Could we have known it then? Do you know it now? You could have been an artist, an intellectual, anything you desired if only you had not chosen to be the good daughter.

In search of a grand theory

Sheets of paper are scattered over the table. And more sheets upon cyclostyled sheets are scribbled all over in pencil, with some words and sometimes even complete paragraphs underlined with a heavy black line. And on smaller pieces of paper there are random words, names and dates scrawled. Arrows are marked here and there to demonstrate how ideas are built thought upon thought endlessly. Until we end up absolutely perplexed by this eternal creation and destruction of theories and ideas. And somehow the world never ends up prettier or wiser. That is what the flower sprouting from the y at the end of bounded rationality seems to indicate.

But you soldier on. For even if everything doesn’t fit or rather your brain isn’t able to comprehend it all and build a grand unified theory it’s all right for this is just one exam and there are 5 more to go. So you rush through Malthus, Weber, Parsons, Sartre, Foucault, reductionism, social alienation, and as you reach cultural dissonance you hear your father in the room next door get angry because he can’t find his shirt. An anonymous impulse, that you can’t quite pin down as you are still dealing with anomie and nihilism, passes on the information that they are neatly piled up in his cupboard just as they always are after they have been washed and ironed. And as the voices and the indifference grow louder and harder to ignore you conclude that the world has gone mad. But almost instantly realize that it is only your family.

So you push aside the incomprehensibility of theories dealing with beliefs, irreducibilities, symbolisms and ideal types and march straight to the cupboard and pick up the pile of shirts and dump them in the middle of the raging argument. And walk back to the comfort of dualism and objectivity, as the voices in the background seem to fade to an ineffectual murmur.