In My Mother's Garden: Part 2

When I talk about birds in my mother’s garden people often imagine a rambling old bungalow set amidst acres of land. So I always end up measuring out the few square feet with my hands: slightly broader than this dining table but much smaller than this living room. The thing that most people seem to overlook is that birds don’t need huge swaths of land; they get by with much less.  Especially birds in the city.

I have had the pleasure of watching house sparrows flock to the seventh floor ledge (barely broad enough for a human to stand on) in our apartment in Bombay. On the tiny balcony in London a bird feeder secured by a shoelace and a few tall plants were invitation enough for the robin, the blackbird, the wren, the great tit and the blue tit and its brood to come visit. The spotted woodpecker to was, well, spotted.

But, yes there is one thing that attracts the birds to my mother’s garden and its vicinity– the garden is allowed to run a little wild. There are a variety of plants, many of them have been around for years and many like the tulsi are allowed to go to seed ensuring that there is plenty of food for different kind of birds, the creepers aren’t trimmed and thinned too often ensuring bird have places to gambol in. And so the birds come.

The point being a bit of water, a little something to peck on and a safe place to perch and preen on is all that the birds look for. And like the merry ramblers of yore, once their few needs are met, they stick around and sing a little song or maybe even share a tale or two.

In My Mother's Garden: Part 1 is here.

Afterword: The Neem tree in the second last picture was planted by my mother in the common area opposite her house some 15 years back. At that time people would look at it and shake their head and mumble, "Wouldn't grow, soil too arid, too many termites, Neem trees don't grow in this region (??) and so on and so forth." However, neither the tree nor my mother seemed to be listening. Today the tree not only gives shelter to a host of birds but seems to be growing so rapidly that its top few branches have to be trimmed every spring as they touch the overhead high-tension wires.

Birds in order of appearance: Brahminy Myna, Black Redstart, Indian Robin (male), Oriental White Eye, Common Myna, Purple Sunbird (female), Red Vented Bulbul, Common Crow, Ashy Prinia, Jungle Babbler, Tailorbird, Little Brown Dove (Laughing Dove), Rufous Treepie, House Sparrow (male)

Light Constant

Last years flowers sit in a mason jar by the desk side. A drop of sunshine falls on the elegant decay and fractures into tiny fragments. For a brief moment in time bits of light get caught between the frail stems and the brittle petals. Everything is subsumed by this burst of light and matter.

It is 1988. Miquel Barceló is in Africa. It is his first trip. In his studio in Mali he is studying light. He is drawing shadows. “The light in the desert is so intense that the things disappear, and the shadows are more intense than the things themselves…What isn’t has more intensity that what is. Because in Africa light isn’t colour. Light is much more stronger than colour. Colour is almost corroded by the light.”* In the night he paints the river. Scratching the paper to obtain the effect of light reflecting from the water. The foam still white in the thick African night.

Barceló is concerned with the passage of time.  The tomatoes, the melon, the skulls, the river, his friends– time spares no one. Each is captured in a state of inevitable transformation. In his studio back home flowers placed in a jar are slowly decomposing over time and the consummate artist doesn’t miss a thing.  Back in Africa the elephants herd is slowly moving towards the river while the skulls in the studio, with their motionless eyes, wait for the sun to go down.

Afterword: Einstein's theory of relativity states time and space aren't as constant as they appear. The only true constant is the speed of light. Time can seem to run faster or slower depending on how high you are, and how fast you are travelling. That's bad news for those who own a penthouse.

*‘The earthly cycles’ by Enrique Juncosa (An essay from Miquel Barceló: works on paper 1979-1999).

You can see Miquel Barceló's art at his fan site here. To see his paintings from Mali click the year 1988 and scroll down the page.

Solitary People

Some people are so used to solitude with themselves that they never compare themselves to others, but spin forth their monologue of a life in a calm, joyous mood, holding good conversations with themselves, even laughing. But if they are made to compare themselves with others, they tend to a brooding underestimation of their selves; so that they have to be forced to learn again from others to have a good, fair opinion of themselves. And even from their learned opinion they will always want to detract or reduce something.
Thus one must grant certain men their solitude, and not be silly enough, as often happens, to pity them for it.

From 'Man Alone with Himself' by Friedrich Nietzsche.

The Cats Will Know

What do the cats know? Have you ever spied them silently watching you and wondered?
I came upon Cesare Pavese on a day when it seemed 'the world is a stage but the play is badly cast.*' Reading these few lines I felt oddly uplifted– the kind of levitation that results when a weight is released; when sorrow isn't denied, but shared. And in an instant the isolation that seemed absolute, even singular, is overcome.

Rain will fall again

on your smooth pavement,

a light rain like

a breath or a step.

The breeze and the dawn

will flourish again

when you return,

as if beneath your step.

Between flowers and sills

the cats will know.

There will be other days,

there will be other voices.

You will smile alone.

The cats will know.

You will hear words

old and spent and useless

like costumes left over

from yesterday’s parties.

You too will make gestures.

You’ll answer with words—

face of springtime,

you too will make gestures.

The cats will know,

face of springtime;

and the light rain

and the hyacinth dawn

that wrench the heart of him

who hopes no more for you—

they are the sad smile

you smile by yourself.

There will be other days,

other voices and renewals.

Face of springtime,

we will suffer at daybreak.

  "The Cats Will Know" a poem by Cesare Pavese from Dissaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950 by Cesare Pavese, translated by Geoff Brock. 
* Who else, but Oscar Wilde.

Green

Colours: part 5

Have pencil, will draw

 Water colour pencil on paper

Everyone draws. Even if it means just doodling in the margins of boring textbooks or scrawling all over the page during insufferable meetings or scribbling in the pad during (or after) a contentious argument. At some point in time one takes the drawings away from the margins and puts them in the center of the page. But the purpose for drawing remains the same. An attempt to put one's thoughts in order. A silent argument between the hand that wields the pencil and the mind that wields the hand. A stream of conscious effort whereby one lets the subconscious wade through stormy tides. Whatever the story behind the humble sketch one thing, as anyone who has ever doodled knows, is certain– doodling helps one think clearly. Often when one puts the pencil down one feels, for want of a better word, refreshed.

I never have doubted the fact that people who doodle during lectures or meetings are able to process the information being given, if not 'better', then at least 'differently' from the others who merely listen. Here's a TED talk that makes the case for unlocking your brain via pad and pen: Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite!

Summer Garden

The clouds abate. The window is a mesh of raindrops. It is the middle of February. Summer is months away. Not that I am complaining. Then a photograph catches my eye and like Louise Glück I too am transported to a different time (in a different country).
                                                     

How quiet the garden is;

no breeze ruffles the Cornelian cherry.

Summer has come.

How quiet it is

now that life has triumphed. The rough

pillars of the sycamores

support the immobile

shelves of the foliage,

the lawn beneath

lush, iridescent—

And in the middle of the sky,

the immodest god.

Things are, he says. They are, they do not change;

response does not change.

How hushed it is, the stage

as well as the audience; it seems

breathing is an intrusion.

He must be very close,

the grass is shadowless.

How quiet it is, how silent,

like an afternoon in Pompeii.

An excerpt from Summer Garden, a poem by Louise Glück. From Poetry (January, 2012)

Winter Chrysanthemums

When the winter chrysanthemums go,
there's nothing to write about
but radishes.
- Matsuo Basho

Look Up!

 

Look up at the birds 

they're making me laugh

making me cry some.

Look up*

The world of coincidences works in mysterious ways. At some point in my life I used to consider coincidences as subliminal messages, an attempt to jolt us into whatever it is the conscience wanted/wants to jolt us into.

Some days back by some (subliminal?) quirk of fate I came upon a song. It was NPR’s Song of the Day, and the perfect gift. It has a beat as good as any to march forward on. It could be an anthem for the beginning of a new year of new possibilities. It is called "Birds". So well, why not? New sun in my arms…

* Birds a song by Caithlin De Marrais. You can listen to it here.

The Bird, the Tree, the Monkey

The story begins on a cold, pale winter morning somewhere in northern India. It starts as a simple tale and then like all good stories grows up to become a fantastical allegory. Something you heard on your grandmother’s lap or in my case something that my youngest niece told me one hot, intense summer afternoon when she was 4 years old. It is not so much about where you heard the story but how and what about it you remember. And most importantly why it comes back from the unfathomable chambers of forgetfulness.

I see the reticent peacock, the benevolent fig tree and one defiant monkey and something like a story stirs in me. I say, but the story wasn’t about peacocks, or monkeys, or fig trees. And then the story in its entirety comes rushing back to me.

That is another magical thing about stories.

Postscript: The peacock in the first picture is a regular visitor to the rooftops where people leave it offerings of food grains. In part due to their religious beliefs and in part due to the peacock's beauty. But the same people think nothing of dumping their daily garbage in the small wild patch that the peacock calls his home.

The tree in the second picture is the Ficus benghalensis or Indian Fig or banyan tree, known as bargad (in Hindi), our national tree, destined to be chopped down in the not so distant future. For some human has claimed the spot where it grew for years as the site for his house. Not a word is mentioned about the countless species that will lose their home.

The monkey in the third picture was a lone male, most likely shunned by the monkey troop, and in desperate search for food. It eyed the vegetable grocers cart with little success and settled for a meal of stolen roti and  banyan leaves. The monkey too is revered in India but human's endless need for "space" is testing the limits of reverence.

This leads us to the reawakening of some other story, whether well-remembered or intentionally forgotten.

The One That Got In

(A short piece on Leftovers published under reader's submissions in The Rumpus, one of the top literary sites in the world.)

One would have had to lead as sheltered a childhood as Gautama Buddha to be oblivious to deprivation while growing up in India. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when I say leftovers aren’t a problem in my family. We finish what is on our plates and anything leftover is the next meal. But then we never start with more than we can consume. My mother, who never has to worry about leftovers, lives in a city that is thirteen hours “ahead” and a twenty-four-hour flight away from me. She, one could safely assume, has vastly different concerns. Grandchildren, weddings, rising prices, and the corporate-political nexus top the list. (Indians take pride in their general knowledge.) Maybe people and their concerns, despite geography and philosophy, aren’t so different after all.
Five years, four countries, three continents, and I am the one who has become most concerned with leftovers—the something that remains, that which is not used. What is left behind when we have established and dealt with how different we all are? What would Americans talk about if all pop cultural references were erased from their collective sub-conscience? Yes, imagine, not a word about or related to Star Wars. That has been my prime focus for the past year here. Depending on the company I am in, for example, at the local co-operative or among urban professionals, the answer ranges from very little to way too much.
My other preoccupation has been the things that are in surplus—things that are still left over when everyone has taken up their share or more. The one thing that seems to be inexhaustible, no matter how hard we try to expend (or ignore) it, is the kindness of strangers. Despite barriers of language and nationality it somehow keeps showing up. From the interiors of India to the shores of the Pacific Ocean there seems to be no getting over it.
That leaves us with the one other issue that dominated November but remains unresolved. How to cope with your family on Thanksgiving. On seeing all the articles one thought kept coming back: “If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies you will not find another.” Carl Sagan said that. At one point in time I used to think all Americans would be like him. All that is leftover from that time are some words.

Paris

Everyone, it seems, has written or is writing about Paris. Yesterday, at the local bookstore, as I browsed the travel section Paris it appeared was the place where most people wanted to be.  Will Self, in Psychogeography (the collection of his Psychogeography columns from the Independent, illustrated by Ralph Steadman), writes, “Tourism is a search for a place that will embrace you”. Paris, I concluded, is the place most people want to be embraced by. Will Paris reciprocate the gesture? Well, that’s an entirely different matter.

Regardless of the embrace or lack of it, all the books on Paris were about the authors' ‘Paris story’ and everyone had a story worth the telling. I, too have a Paris story. I think more than a single story. The closest to my heart are the ones where I walk into Paris that is right out of a Mavis Gallant story. The stories of Mavis Gallant, in my opinion embrace Paris. You can interpret this statement howsoever you want to.

As with every affair, bound by love or hate, it is the first memory that is indelible. That instance when you realize you have fallen in love, or in hate.

My first trip to Paris was marked by extremely propitious circumstances. A few days before the flight I got a call that informed me that the work I had been a part of had won a Gold Lion at Cannes. It was, but of course, exhilarating. But though I had been there to witness the work from its birth, to its growth and culmination. It wasn’t my baby. My name appeared on the certificate just because I had been there. That is how it is with awards. I, myself, laid to claim to it. So, the exhilaration was not for me but for the vindication of an undertaking that had been deemed impossible. That is a story best told on some other forum.

It should come as no surprise then if I say I too embraced Paris (and Paris returned the gesture) though it was a circuitous embrace with detours to Amsterdam, Germany and Vienna. All except the last not part of the initial travel plan. That is what ‘winning’ entails. And that is why awards, especially in certain professions, are so coveted. That is till one wins an award. After the ‘winning’ is done one can assume nonchalance and indifference to all the shenanigans. But somewhere deep down we are still a child dreaming of holding aloft a gleaming trophy, the proof of our triumph. Does the trophy change anything? The answer is a complicated yes and no.

On the evening before the flight back home as I walked along the Seine after all the winning and detours had been dealt with I knew life wouldn’t be the same the moment I would touch down. In just under a month of wandering the street of Europe, life, as I had known it had ceased to exist. As I type these words the enormity of it all once again overwhelms. How little it takes to overturn the apple cart?

A few years have passed since then. And contrary to my concern (in the lines above) life never overwhelms. Sometimes the sun refuses to shines outside the window, sometimes it never ceases to give it a rest. In darkness, as in light, we manage just fine.

And Paris. Well, Paris too goes on. People move in and out of its streets. Some devastated by its indifference, others glad for its transient embrace. They too, irrespective of their experiences, get on. We all live to see what the next day brings. For, when it comes to life there is only one reassuring constant– it goes on. Unmindful of any particular triumph or loss.

Dawn Goes Down Today

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Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

– Nothing Gold Can Stay a poem by Robert Frost.

It took Robert Frost just eight lines to give us, what Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own refers to as "a nugget of pure truth". Etched in our memory, we wrap our minds around these lines and it seems we can fill sheets upon sheets of paper trying to fathom their depth. While Robert Frost needed only eight lines.

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting...Read it a hundred times; it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went."
– Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes"

Robert Frost referred to poetry as "a momentary stay against confusion". He elevated poetry to the level of science– as both deal in metaphors. Then went on to say, "all metaphors break down somewhere". His philosophy, where doubt follows faith, and uncertainty follows certainty, is something that practitioners of Eastern philosophy, would totally "get" without the need for sheets upon sheets of paper.