Said I one night to a pristine seer
(Who knew the secrets of whirling time)
"Sir, you well perceive
That goodness and faith,
Fidelity and love
Have all departed from this sorry land
Father and son are at each other's throat;
Brother fights brother, Unity and federation are undermined
Despite all these ominous signs,
Why has not Doomsday come?
Who holds the reins of the Final Catastrophe?
The hoary old man of lucent ken
Pointed towards Kashi and gently smiled
"The Architect", he said, "is fond of this edifice
Because of which there is color in life; He
Would not like it to perish and fall."
(Mirza Ghalib, Benares, 1827)
Showing posts with label india. Show all posts
Showing posts with label india. Show all posts
11.5.11
24.11.10
Benares
The City of Light.
They may be funeral pyres burning day and night, but it's still the city of lights.
They may be funeral pyres burning day and night, but it's still the city of lights.
Jai Kali Maa
Until 1837, every Friday a boy was sacrificed at the big Kali temple in Calcutta. The Kali-worshiping Thuggee strangled and buried as sacrifices their victims with lead-weighted yellow kerchiefs.
In the Kali temple beside Manikarnika Ghat in Benares where the funeral pyres burn fierce day and night one can openly buy brown sugar and opium and white heroin.
All this we know.
But is Kali a dark goddess?
In the Kali temple beside Manikarnika Ghat in Benares where the funeral pyres burn fierce day and night one can openly buy brown sugar and opium and white heroin.
All this we know.
But is Kali a dark goddess?
8.9.10
21.8.10
"You had learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something."
(George Bernard Shaw)
There is a strange convoluted story that this thought encapsulates. I will tell it later.
I lost all sorts of things, including my mind. Hope that no one ever maliciously spikes your drink with datura (deliriant hallucinogen of nightmares). You will naturally wake up several days later on some temple steps overlooking the Ganges, totally cleaned out. Maybe with luck you will still have your clothes. With luck you will not have taken a vicious blow from a steel bar across your head laying it open to the skull, and have a vague memory of cotton thread stitches at Marwari, the people's hospital, the sensation of the needle going through your flesh and feeling no pain at all. Strange flashes of huddling in the night, naked in a Kali temple, talking to faces of entities floating inside the walls. No memory at all of being treated like a street lunatic or of being taken in by a compassionate rickshaw driver and given brown sugar as a tranquiliser.
These things you will discover later, after you wake up in a filthy room that you don't recognise, overlooking the sunrise over the river. Seemingly once again smoking filthy brown powder because there is a darkness that won't lift. Once again playing main suspect and chief investigator at the same time as you try to uncover where the missing days went.
If you are going to be an idiot like that, at least hope for chloral hydrate or Rohypnol, which are pretty good to knock someone out without the psychotic effects. But why spend the money when you can just grab a handful of datura from the garden?
Oh shit, and it's one of the oldest tricks in the book, I've heard it so many times before.
Everything happens for a reason.
Not necessarily a very good one though.
9.8.10
28.7.10
enshrouded in monsoon cloud and never-ending drizzle. cocooned in mist.
take the high road.
now the cloud is below, and the mountain stretches upward, impossibly, forever. the road zig-zags up the mountainside in an impossible 20km traffic jam of churning mud, broken-down trucks, pouring waterfalls and choking smoke. from nowhere, pani puri men with trays on long spindly legs appear along the length of the snarling snake of traffic, like mushrooms from spores that lie dormant until just the right circumstances appear.
what if we are dead and this is the afterlife and we just don't know it yet?
take the high road.
now the cloud is below, and the mountain stretches upward, impossibly, forever. the road zig-zags up the mountainside in an impossible 20km traffic jam of churning mud, broken-down trucks, pouring waterfalls and choking smoke. from nowhere, pani puri men with trays on long spindly legs appear along the length of the snarling snake of traffic, like mushrooms from spores that lie dormant until just the right circumstances appear.
what if we are dead and this is the afterlife and we just don't know it yet?
29.1.10
A short visit to Hindustan
After four days of living in train stations, airports, sleeping in luggage racks entwined with sudra labourers from deepest Bihar, living on guavas with salt and chilli pepper, popping hypnotics at an alarming rate which I don't realise until I see the empty cards in the side pocket of my bag - because I feel a nagging sense of unwellness, an unhealthy sweat, and I have left behind someone I love - and because of course Benares has its silks, and its temples, and its ancient pilgrims waiting to die by the sacred river, and of course it still has its prostitutes - and its powder unlimited too, and I am weak and sweating out opiate metabolites. Maybe to you in a holy city you must be holy, but here everything you do is holy by definition.
After a tour of the alien south, I am finally back in Hindi country, and it feels good to know that even after ten years, I am no longer completely an uncomprehending stranger in a strange land - fellow travellers either undeservedly congratulate or rib me for my lurching heavily urdu-leaning hindi. By the second day in the train I feel the air getting hot heavy and wet with the air of the Arabian sea and know Bombay is near. Arrive, instantly engulfed and swallowed by the lunatic city, a giant pulsating pululating creature, a local train ride is like a particularly harsh full-body massage, and here there is the new generation too, sultry Indian college girls and neon lights of bars and clubs winking seductively.
Half-sleep, wake intermittently from disquieting dreams, in an airport that is too freezingly air-conditioned. And then it is into the tunnel of steel, first past the sandbagged emplacements outside the departure terminals and then surrender to the processing and rendering and petty humiliation we are subjected to these days for the privilege to fly. The plane is full of dark Dravidians speaking south Indian languages going to their servile jobs in the Gulf, the occasional Pakistani, an English convert to Islam.
In Muscat, Oman, the banking system does not seem to realise that all of my accounts are overdrawn to the maximum and put me well in credit, and I wonder whether I should take advantage and empty the duty-free shop. I settle for the traditional cigarettes and tobacco - I am trying to give up, but it is all at ten per cent of the UK price. Drug dealers and capitalists.
Mystified, I need to find an internet to contact my banks and see what this is all about. There is only one public one, in the business centre of the luxury Plaza VIP waiting room, so I charge 10 Omani Ryals to my abused Visa card for three hours of luxury - hot shower, wash my shirt collar, shave, breakfast like a king, Red Label unlimited. Very good value.
Earlier, I sat in the waiting room cafe sipping tepid tea and wondering at the number of people in military-type jackets with corporals' or sergeants' stripes on their sleeves. Why not full shoulder-boards with generals' or staff officers' tabs, I wondered? And instead of buying that awfully interesting looking Robert Fish (Fisk?) book, something about the great war for civilisation and the conquest of the Middle East, about decades of atrocity and injustice across the Middle East and Central Asia, decide to finish James Joyce's Ulysses on the last leg of the journey back to freezing London.
Stories from recent months hopefully follow soon.
After a tour of the alien south, I am finally back in Hindi country, and it feels good to know that even after ten years, I am no longer completely an uncomprehending stranger in a strange land - fellow travellers either undeservedly congratulate or rib me for my lurching heavily urdu-leaning hindi. By the second day in the train I feel the air getting hot heavy and wet with the air of the Arabian sea and know Bombay is near. Arrive, instantly engulfed and swallowed by the lunatic city, a giant pulsating pululating creature, a local train ride is like a particularly harsh full-body massage, and here there is the new generation too, sultry Indian college girls and neon lights of bars and clubs winking seductively.
Half-sleep, wake intermittently from disquieting dreams, in an airport that is too freezingly air-conditioned. And then it is into the tunnel of steel, first past the sandbagged emplacements outside the departure terminals and then surrender to the processing and rendering and petty humiliation we are subjected to these days for the privilege to fly. The plane is full of dark Dravidians speaking south Indian languages going to their servile jobs in the Gulf, the occasional Pakistani, an English convert to Islam.
In Muscat, Oman, the banking system does not seem to realise that all of my accounts are overdrawn to the maximum and put me well in credit, and I wonder whether I should take advantage and empty the duty-free shop. I settle for the traditional cigarettes and tobacco - I am trying to give up, but it is all at ten per cent of the UK price. Drug dealers and capitalists.
Mystified, I need to find an internet to contact my banks and see what this is all about. There is only one public one, in the business centre of the luxury Plaza VIP waiting room, so I charge 10 Omani Ryals to my abused Visa card for three hours of luxury - hot shower, wash my shirt collar, shave, breakfast like a king, Red Label unlimited. Very good value.
Earlier, I sat in the waiting room cafe sipping tepid tea and wondering at the number of people in military-type jackets with corporals' or sergeants' stripes on their sleeves. Why not full shoulder-boards with generals' or staff officers' tabs, I wondered? And instead of buying that awfully interesting looking Robert Fish (Fisk?) book, something about the great war for civilisation and the conquest of the Middle East, about decades of atrocity and injustice across the Middle East and Central Asia, decide to finish James Joyce's Ulysses on the last leg of the journey back to freezing London.
Stories from recent months hopefully follow soon.
23.12.09
Cochin
...'Jewel of the Arabian Sea' ...always had a fabled aura in my mind...
(The contraptions in the photos are fishing machines like Chinese dragons, introduced by the Chinese here in Kubla Khan's time... their jaws are strung with nets which plunge into the sea again and again for fish...)
20.12.09
Search
No one knows where Brian's (original post from the time) unfinished book is. Although he never seemed terribly concerned with finishing it; the writing of it was what was important. I believe it is somewhere in the south of India, in a metal trunk packed with manuscripts, notebooks and typescripts.
By one of those strange coincidences ("I believe in coincidences but I don't trust them" as Doc O says), I ran into a mutual friend of ours from Goa from 10 or 11 years ago (a time before e-mail and mobile phones). "He spoke a lot about you the last time we talked," she told me.
When the murder happened*, I was in the middle of my descent into a long and opiated dark night of the soul, and none of it really registered then. It is only now, that I have revisited places we knew and loved those years ago, that a deep sadness has fallen on me; a realisation I never knew at the time how much our friendship meant.
I have the name of a town, a less than half-remembered care-of address, and a laser-printed photo, and I go searching.
* CNJ report from the time. The "salacious gossip", speaking evil of the dead, that Michael Griffin refers to would be from The Sun (see link in my original post if you're that curious), and maybe also from this other CNJ story - "their body language showed they were more than just friends" - yes, in England maybe, but Brian was warm and physically affectionate in a way that few English people are.
By one of those strange coincidences ("I believe in coincidences but I don't trust them" as Doc O says), I ran into a mutual friend of ours from Goa from 10 or 11 years ago (a time before e-mail and mobile phones). "He spoke a lot about you the last time we talked," she told me.
When the murder happened*, I was in the middle of my descent into a long and opiated dark night of the soul, and none of it really registered then. It is only now, that I have revisited places we knew and loved those years ago, that a deep sadness has fallen on me; a realisation I never knew at the time how much our friendship meant.
I have the name of a town, a less than half-remembered care-of address, and a laser-printed photo, and I go searching.
* CNJ report from the time. The "salacious gossip", speaking evil of the dead, that Michael Griffin refers to would be from The Sun (see link in my original post if you're that curious), and maybe also from this other CNJ story - "their body language showed they were more than just friends" - yes, in England maybe, but Brian was warm and physically affectionate in a way that few English people are.
14.12.09
India
there are more foreign cars and motorbikes on the roads than there were... everyone has a mobile phone... everything is a bit more expensive, except for internet and phone access... brahmins still chant prayers in ancient temples, priests mumble mass in portuguese-era churches, the azan still rings out from minarets, narrow streets still smell of jasmine, incense, butchers' offal and sewers... women still sway in brilliantly coloured saris and grizzled fishermen scratch their chins, autorickshaw horns squawk angrily at cows ambling through traffic chewing on plastic bags... the arabian sea still crashes in gentle waves on the white sands and the palm trees still sway in the breeze...
(the new 1 and 2 rupee coins with a thumbs-up and v-for-victory/peace-man for the no-alphabets, with older British-influenced coins above)
