The purpose of art

is to express, not to impress.

For The Revenant

I've been waiting months for this. And now that you're finally here all I can say is where were you?

Standing by, By standing

If I had the choice to make it alright
If I had the time to wait here all night
If I had my way, then I wouldn't hear you say
But I know I have to stay,
I am

Standing by
By standing

There were times when I had made it alright
There were places I had stayed in all night
If there were reasons why, I let all this time go by
Now I'm waiting here tonight
I am

Standing by
By standing

What do I do today
I cannot go away
What do i do right now
I am just here to stay
I know I'll never be
All that you want me to be
I know i'll never try
Now I say

(How could I have been so
Near sighted I don't know
Why did I not let you
In now I'm lost)

Standing by
By standing

[PSP12" - Zero]

Kadambari [Part Two]

Three years passed that day and Kadambari still taught at the same school and she would still have to frequent the jhopadpatti to get kids to come to school. Many a times she had to convince the parents personally to let their children receive formal education. Sadly many girls and boys were not as aspiring as they are shown to be in the P.S.A.s, acronym for Public Service Announcements. In fact most of them were a year behind the prescribed state curriculum. At age 12, they were forced to get part time jobs. Not so much out of parental pressure as because of their own maturity. Some of her older students were the same age as Arjun.
Kadambari bought a webcam for her home computer. It was the greatest gadget that Arjun could have thought of. It connected two people and bought them virtually face-to-face on an intimate internet talk. For the first time he entered her home and although his vision was confined just to the computer room he was happy. Because it was where Kadambari would spend most of her time when she was home. Here she was surrounded by a plethora of books, D.V.D.s, school notebooks and rarely-used-badly-kept office stationery. Her favourite was the punching machine. She’d occasionally punch a dozen sheets beyond recognition and throw the dots of paper in the air. She imagined them to be snowflakes. Some of them were slightly bent and seemed to twinkle as they topsy-turvied on thin air. Every ‘flake’ of paper, regardless of its parent sheet, appeared like the other. Every floating dot was blue, for they all radiated light from the only source; the computer monitor. Her reading lamp was orphaned in a corner, but it was religiously switched on every night between 11:30 and 1 AM. The room had no windows, only a ventilation fan about two sizes bigger than the on her computer chassis. It needed oil.
Kadambari was very happy. Though she still had horrible pay, still was on weed and charas. She made new friends in the dope bazaar and introduced some of them to Arjun. They were hard to spot people. Their getup was so inconspicuous that one would not remember their features after a brief first meeting. The names were equally difficult to memorise, most liked to add a bhai suffix to their alias. All were nice people but they just needed a wardrobe makeover. Although most of them couldn’t speak English, they were all independent in the money, thought and action arenas.
Arjun and Kadambari continued to meet every month or so and every time they did they’d smoke up a couple of joints. He never knew where she got these and how she paid for them. Regardless he never asked and never felt the need to offer contributing more than a cigarette. He would often bring his guitar and the couple would sit under the same tree facing Marine Drive. Smoking up made them want to sing their heart out and the guitar only made their musical skills look more authentic. Often either one of them would go into a random song in the middle of a conversation. When they couldn’t meet it was the same code of conduct on the phone. They talked like this every day until...
One day she would just not pick up the phone, Arjun waited for her reply for an hour and a half. Then he called again. That night she wasn’t online, it was highly unusual for a videophile like her.
The next day, he waited for her call till 4 PM and decided to call again. This time he heard a recording saying that the number was switched off. He double checked to make sure that he had dialled the correct number. It was the correct number. This continued for a week. He didn’t give up though. He couldn’t. He had no choice. There was no other way to contact her.
What could one do? When you lose someone with whom you’d talk to day and night and the only imaginable reason to stop would be a dead battery. He knew a lot about her through such unending conversations. He knew her favourite brand of face wash, its fruit flavours and when she used it. It was the first thing she did; wash her face with the lemon flavour before switching the PC on. He knew the books she read. He knew the people she liked and disliked and the reasons for her judgement. He knew which piece of accessory defined her best. He knew the colour and the design on every thread of her favourite handkerchief, orange and polka dotted.
They say that when you lose something, you should track back and try to find it among your own footsteps. All he could do was step back and relive all the memories, think about all the time they spent together and revisit all the places that where they were together, when they were together.
He knew her favourite book, Shantaram and that’s he decided to start his journey. It was a good place to start as she was a chronic reader. Most of her social life was from the written world. She talked to characters she came to terms with; love, hate or indifference. She talked how a novelist would write and it was her urbane diction interspersed with a naive smile that confused him the most. It took him a while to familiarize himself with her ways. She wasn’t very popular where she lived, wherever in Dadar that she lived. She’d once said “A good book is like a friend whom you would hang around with the whole day. You could have vivid conversations with it. Books read you as much as you read them.” He wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that final remark back then but now he knew exactly what she was talking about. I intend to tell you this somewhere in the next few pages.
He finished Shantaram in a few weeks. It was the biggest novel he’d ever read. In every page he saw facets of Kadambari’s character. He would pause and think ‘What would she do in this situation?’ and the answer that he got would most often be what would follow. This made the book more interactive rather than predictable. It was like a chat with a friend. However, how much ever the book delighted him; it merely reminded him of Kadambari. It gave no clue as to what caused such behaviour.
It took a great toll on his mind, his entire schedule faded into just one big day. He couldn’t sleep much and was never active when he was awake. As endless days faded into solitary soliloquies of the night only the image of her charming face flashed in and out of his mind, interspersed with images of them singing under the lonely tree.
Perhaps the most horrifying image was that of being up till three in the morning and staring straight into the face of the computer monitor. The blank ‘online friends’ list was a stark whiplash for Arjun’s soul. He had grown used to kissing her goodnight right around this time. What were equally alarming were the black spots on his elbow. These black spots were molten rubber from the arm rests of the chair where he would sit and stare at their chat logs and her profile, unaffected by the stickiness under his elbows. Most unforgiving were the crows and their kaas that pierced the silent night and announced the arrival of the next day. ‘One more day of hopeless attempts at understanding a woman.’ he thought.
We started this story by talking about death. The word seems colder than ever when one’s uncertain of its truthfulness. The end of life as a human being. What Arjun was trying to do was to understand that outerlively event from a point in his life. All one could do is hypothesise. For it would be like explaining a rainbow to a blind man. Or explicating music for a deaf person.
God forbid, Kadambari could well be on the other side of the rainbow dancing to a tune incomprehensible to the human ear. Dead or otherwise, in the end Arjun was frustrated because he had no way to know for sure. All he could do was wait. Aimlessly anticipating a call, a message, an email or even inshallah he would even bump into her one day under the same ol’ tree.
All he knows today is that one of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And somethings are just so sad that only the soul can do the crying for you.
As you’ve probably figured out by now, Arjun’s got a lot of chafe within him. He’s more frustrated than ever and doesn’t know where to vent all his rage. He has a creative writing submission in a few hours. But he isn’t creative; he’s flunked twice in a row. He has to hammers away on the keyboard till he’s done. He’s not that creative. He writes in third-person and refers to himself as a mythical warrior caught in a moral dilemma. He is still not over Kadambari and still sees her in everything he does.

Kadambari [Part One]

“I want to do everything humanly possible in one lifetime. I want it all. I want to think to my self that when I die, I would have lived a fantastically vivid life!” said Arjun, unknowing of what it really means to be dead. Of course none of us has the slightest idea; even if we did we’d have no ways of proving it or even sharing it. Death as a concept overrides the whole purpose of meaning. Anyway, thus Arjun responded when Kadambari said “I thought you were clean. Why do you want a joint?”
Bewildered by the 15-year-old’s reply, she agreed to roll him one. Arjun left for a nigh tapri. The walk from the tapri to the tree underneath which they were sitting was a modest one but it gave Arjun a high, one that creative people call a moment of clarity. In this moment he could sense everything around him, he felt the ocean-winds as they brushed against the hair on the back of his left ring-finger. He saw funny men selling colourful balloons and he saw his reflection on a soap bubble just before it popped at his nose. He heard the snap of the beetle nut chopper as he asked for a Davidoff and a Classic Mild. He knew Kadambari well enough by now to guess that she had more ‘stuff’ on her than what was sanctioned for him. And that it was going to be a long, romantic night.
The walk back was equally invigorating. He was certain that this was the day when he finally got a chance to open up more intimately with a woman whom he knew and adored for almost a year. Kadambari was a teacher at a local school for the underprivileged. She was as tall as him and six years elder. She sought no love affair with the boy but only needed a friend. She lived alone in her Dadar apartment and talked to not many people. She had a degree from the National Institute of Fashion Technology, but chose to follow her passion and taught the kids at Colaba. She barely was able to make ends meet and lived off cigarettes and alcohol supplied by friends. Such passion for doing what she wanted was her terrible weakness. With all her 3000 rupee paycheques she just couldn’t let go of the weed. She always had some stuff on her and never smoked alone. She paid for some with cash and others with clandestine favours of flesh. Promiscuousness and void a sense of independence are often seen as the same thing, often.
Arjun returned and held a cigarette. “I hope you just bought one,” grinned Kadambari.

Weed is a terribly misunderstood and misrepresented product in the media. Even the dope movies and rock music videos get it wrong. He understood this only when he took his first drag of the joint that she prepared. He had waited five minutes and made sure to tap out all the tobacco from the Classic Mild — her brand of choice — and watched with full concentration as she stuffed the crushed leaves into the empty tube. His eyes followed her tongue roll over the joint and longed to hold sess stick between his fingers and on his lips.
She lit it up and puffed on it twice before handing it over to Arjun. The tube was still wet from her lick it was as much a pleasure to his fingers as to his lips. He sucked in a tiny dose and gave it ten seconds to kick in. Then he puffed again.
“That’s it?” Arjun voiced his disappointment.
“What were you expecting?”
“Well, you know... this is an intoxicant and I thought it would at least get me slightly pleasantly intoxicated.”
“It makes me feel sleepy.” laughed Kadambari and rested her head on his shoulder.
By now Arjun dragged so hard that there was a little flame emerging from the opposite end. In his mind he thought ‘smoke up with beautiful woman by the sea, check.’ as he ticked off the thought on his imaginary things-to-do-before-I-die list. Next on the list was ‘make love to beautiful woman’.
“You sure I am doing it right?” enquired Arjun.
“What did you expect?”
“Mm... I thought we were gonna have sex. With all the things they say on TV and the movies, I thought we would wake up in some abandoned house on Wednesday afternoon.”
“Mad or what?” she laughed and took the joint from his fingers.
“Bah. Make me another one.” He gave her the longer Davidoff.
There’s something about smoking up that’s uncannily bonding. It’s like being on a nude beach, stripped off of every worldly possession, everything that connects you to a bigger melting pot of people. Exposed for every naked scar on the pure flesh of a human conscience, Kadambari and Arjun bonded like never before. Before the evening, they had talked mostly in cyber chat rooms or blabbered through lazy nights and lonely afternoons on five-hour-phone-calls. These are times of a communication revolution and physical meetings are a rarity between even the closest of chums.
“Tell me why do you smoke weed?” asked Arjun, not so much because he really wanted to know, just to break the silence which Kadambari had funnily grown comfortable into.
“All you want is for me to keep talking eh?”
“No, I really want to know, because here I see this wonderful woman, trying to inspire a generation of people who were left to fend for themselves. Left out by the government and forced to work at a young age. I ask what could be more satisfying than watching a whole class of beaten down kids looking up to you as their guardian angel. I ask what better drug could there be than the faith in the eyes of a stranger.”
“Well, if you put it that way, I smoke up because it reminds me of Gregory. I don’t know if you’ve read Shantaram...”
“I haven’t.”
“Do read it. Gregory is the greatest, most romantic guy in the world today. He is what I want to be. He is my role model and I could marry the guy without thinking twice. Of course he was a drug dealer, a Mafioso, a man who could do anything. But he is a free man in a world where most of us pretend to be free. To be chained to a sea of market statistics and to not even know about it, is what gives us the illusion of safety, the illusion of freedom. Reasons and alibis abound in a world where what you pay is what you get. But who sets these prices and what good would it do to you are questions left for the answering machines of corporations that only want to sell you stuff that they have in stock, as opposed to things that you really need. Things like weed.”

“How poetic!” interfered Arjun, just to show that he was listening.
“Yes. And Greg is a person who’s escaped prison, travelled half way across the world and found peace in a place most people see as hell. Colaba jhopadpatti. And every time I see my kids, I see their souls touched by the Gora who spent years living among them, as one of them. I see distant scars of wounds healed by his soothing hands; I see my mind flip through pages of the novel — so passionately penned by him — every time threads of smoke rise before my eyes.”
“Rise before my eyes, Wah! Your poetical prowess proves progressing per para.” comic timing was one thing he had no control over. He would crack a quack every time he found himself in an odd situation. As for this situation Arjun was jealous.
“Shut up! I thought you really wanted to know.” sighed Kadambari, “It’s getting late, I have to go.” There was a moment’s pause where they were gauging every change in each other’s facial expression. Neither spoke but both were looking intently for any signs of unassumingness. This was the closest they’d been all evening. Sitting next to each other, staring wordlessly into eyes which hid nothing because they were too busy spotting signs of mistrust in a face-to-face mindreading contest. Before normalcy kicked in, they burst out with a thunder of laugher.
And this is how they opened up. The conversations that followed were illogically nonlinear and innocently unfeigned.