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Loving

I once presented an acquaintance with a souvenir I had chosen with care during a trip, expecting her to be delighted with it. She surprised me by saying, “I don’t actually want this myself, but I’ll take it because it will make a nice gift for someone.” I blurted out, “If I’d known you would want to give it away, I wouldn’t have given it to you in the first place.”

In that instance, I realised my error. I saw how dreadful it is to mentally hold on to something I have already given away. I was unable to give unconditionally, saying, “You are free to throw it out or give it away. It is enough that you have accepted it.”

I felt grateful, thinking, “How fortunate I am to have been exposed to the teachings of the Buddha, so that I could recognise that part of me that clings to possessions.” To paraphrase Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), “May my loving you not become a burden to you, for I have freely chosen to love you.”

In loving and giving unconditionally, Tagore avoided burdening the person he addressed. Realising how much my thinking differed from Tagore’s, I blushed in shame.

Zen Seeds: 60 Essential Teachings on Effort, Gratitude, and Happiness, Shundo Aoyama

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“How best may a man make himself beloved?”

“A man will be beloved if, possessed with great power, he still does not make himself feared.”

Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda

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Oh Lord, I beseech Thee to allow me to remain gracious amidst all adversities that life throws my way.

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Skygazing

We photographed Her again today -

You & I

Etched silhouettes of trees and towers and Time

On virtual photo film,

Engraved Her fragrance and Her colours divine

In the museums of our grateful minds.

6:32 am in the East Coast:

Blessed new day, sunrise in my teacup.

She reveals Herself to me; I watch Her

Gently discard Her floral nightgown -

Embroidered with last evening’s cobweb silk,

Embellished with flowers from midnight’s meadows and hills.

Deep Lilac lightly caresses Her left breast,

While Morning Rose embraces the rest of Her bosom

With the effortless genius of a Sumi-e master’s brushstrokes.

Bedtime Blue makes way for its breakfast hue,

Staining Her bare parts like carelessly-spilt India ink

On a sheet of Japanese white rice paper.

The sacred Dawn Sky is upon me now.

What could be sweeter than my solitude?

Don’t got no curtains, but I got me the Moon;

No time for no lovers, yet my dear heart is full.

In solidarity, the autumn breeze plays me a loving tune

I say a silent little prayer, hoping it will reach You.

09:02 pm: Dusk descends upon the mighty Pacific.

I see your memory-marker,

You too chose the Sky,

Now Peach and Pink and Yellow and a slight hint of Seagull White.

Do you want some sunset in your teacup?

Here, drink some, but only with your kind, beautiful eyes.

We’re both seekers, in search of the same bright Light,

With folded hands, we look high up towards the Sky.

She imparts the primordial wisdom of Truth-Consciousness-Bliss

It’s ours to receive, with humility, not pride.

So

We photographed Her again today -

You & I

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“Listen, every object’s in flux. The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith, justice, evil - they’re all fluid and in transition. They don’t stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.”

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

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Mother’s Smile

During the summer before the technoromantic Plague

In the izakaya where only this Mo(me)nt (is) réal

You embraced Snow, father of the Sound of Peace,

Whose eyes are shaped like a talking fish and a bird at civil war

You broke bioluminescent bread with Nicotine Nympho

First forgiving, then detaching from the exuviae of your former self

Ennobled, you are now ready to receive That which lies on the other side of Fear

Renunciation is Ecdysis is Rebirth

“Why do you long for me, Snow?” “Sayu, for the same reason you breathe.”

“What do you call people with desire-shaped vacuums in their hearts?”

“Is there a discount on suitcases excess-baggaged with despair?”

Now, now, surrender your mortal grief

Sleep, like sex, belongs to the Unseen Strength

A complete unmasking of your conditioned layers and your made-up self

Here, dive into the depths of the Ocean of Pure Consciousness

To reclaim all that you never truly lost, to whole your holy holes

Departure: the obstacle is your path, the journey your destination

Samskara your fuel, dream your Swanship

The albino ladybird from Etobicoke the GPS in your head

The name of the last cigarette you smoked was Takumi

Don’t you recall how it felt to inhale that last arsenic-laced drag

Under the nori-coloured waters of the hungry river called Illusion?

Our Lady of Pomegranate Blossoms witnessed and celebrated your Satori

The metamorphosis of your transmigratory intent into definitive (non)action

In transit: the City of the Thousand-petalled Blue Lotus

This ain’t no Disco Democracy of division-engendered decay

Or finitudes and pestilences of the mind or body

No trauma-ridden addictions, no self-saboteurs, no prison nor police state

Ignorance is for the suffering intellect, for those wandering the realm of the waking

In this State of Turiya, of ineffable bliss, deeper than Deep Sleep

The nondual oneness and justness of Life is determined

By the colour of human blood, not the tone of human skin

Arrival: Hello Sayu, welcome Home to your Absolute Self

Behold the eternal, self-luminous substratum of everything:

Your Mother Shyāmā, who cradles in Her golden womb the Universe

Simultaneously creating, sustaining and destroying: Cosmic Algorithm

Her hair, black as the clouds of a late afternoon Kalboishakhi storm

Clothed in nothing but form, weaved of silk both sacred and profane

She sings: At the end of all Knowledge, on the other side of Fear, is Love

For making this journey, dear one, I bequeath to you My Smile

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It’s not enough to be nice in life. You’ve got to have nerve.

Georgia O’Keeffe

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Dawn in Mongolia was an amazing thing. In one instant, the horizon became a faint line suspended in the darkness, and then the line was drawn upward, higher and higher. It was as if a giant hand had stretched down from the sky and slowly lifted the curtain of night from the face of the earth. It was a magnificent sight, far greater in scale...than anything that I, with my limited human faculties, could fully comprehend. - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

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Interviewing William Dalrymple

He has dodged sniper bullets in the heart of Taliban territory, befriended a former mujahideen and recently dined with Barack Obama at the White House! What’s it like to be William Dalrymple? To live a life encountering characters as varied as Tantric skull-feeders, possessed temple dancers, Egyptian Orthodox Christian monks, Nobel laureates, Presidents and Prime Ministers? Born in Scotland, this multiple award-winning writer and historian has made India his home for the past 30 years. The self-confessed ‘goatherd’ (who lives in a farmhouse in Mehrauli in New Delhi) says, “The greatest moments of my life have been in this country. It’s provided an endless source of interest, peace, fascination, beauty. The most intense moments of my life have been here.”

Dalrymple arrived in India at age 18 when a friend convinced him to make the journey after his plans to head to Iraq as an archaeologist got cancelled. He said it took him six weeks to fall in love with India, “and thirty years on I’m still here now!”

On September 14, the 48-year-old was in Goa for the opening of his artist-wife Olivia Fraser’s exhibition at Sunaparanta, Goa Centre for the Arts. He graciously granted me an interview. Read on to find out some lesser-known facts about William Dalrymple, including that he has Bengali blood and that he counts Virginia Woolf among his ancestors!

PR: You have been someone looking at India and its people from the perspective of an outsider. How challenging has that been for you?

WD: So many writers who have put India on the map in the West writing in English for a Western audience have done this journey from here to London or New York – Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie. Of the premier division in the West, only Arundhati Roy really has remained here. Everyone else has gone away at some point. I’ve done the opposite journey. For whatever reason, it’s moving against the crowd. And I think I’m probably the only Western writer who started in the West, lives here and is a major bestseller in India. So I’m slightly on my own. And sometimes there are these Twitter trolls turning up and saying ‘what are you doing here’, ‘who are you?’, ‘go home Gora’. It is mainly on Twitter. Occasionally some other character rises up from the depths. Ultimately it’s the same thing. You’re an immigrant, you’re in a different culture and the kind of abuse that Rushdie or Ghosh or Vikram Seth might get on a tube – ‘brown guy go home’ – you get from Twitter trolls here. It’s a universal thing. Immigrants will have friction wherever they are in the world, in whatever culture they arrive in. It’s something you live with. And the good side of that is that you have the interest and excitement of living in a different culture.

PR: Most people aren’t aware, but you’re related to Virginia Woolf?

WD: We share a mutual Bengali ancestor. Virginia Woolf was one-eighth Bengali. Bengalis haven’t woken up to this! There were these girls, five sisters called the Pattle sisters. One (Sophia Pattle) was my great-great-grandmother and another was Virginia Woolf’s aunt. She was my first cousin twice removed or two generations back.

PR: Through the course of writing your many books on India, you have encountered a wide variety of characters - from devadasis to Baul & Sufi mystics and the ghosts of Mughal princesses and their British lovers. What I find intriguing is your ability to portray each personality with familiarity, like you recognise their individual essences. How do you do that?

WD: Most of the examples you’ve used are from Nine Lives. In Nine Lives, the key was just long interviews. What you do for that, the technique is you spend time with people, you sit there listening to them. The art is, in a sense, to drill away, keep on drilling, normal conversations with strangers and after 10-15 minutes you try and keep it up for three, four, five hours. The ones in Nine Lives were months. I went to Dharamsala to try and find a Buddhist monk with a vague idea of what I was after and I went to Sravanabelagola to find a Jain nun. But I didn’t know what story I was after and I didn’t quite know how it would fit in.Nine Lives was difficult only in the sense that I didn’t know what I was looking for. And in truth, what I was looking for was a good story. Nine Lives was so amorphous in its concept that until you found someone that had an extraordinary story, there was no way of engineering that.

PR: You wrote a touching essay in Edge of Faith, photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta’s pictorial chronicle of Goa’s Catholic community. What struck you most about Goa and its people in the course of your research?

WD: In Edge of Faith, I was coming in on the coattails of Prabuddha who had already taken photographs before I arrived. That was a luxury project for me. He came to me, I negotiated a deal whereby, rather than having a fee, he got me a house in Goa for six months. What I hadn’t realised was how many Goan Catholics knew about their Hindu roots – what caste they came from, which temple they went to, all the shared festivals between the Hindus and Catholics in Goa. That was pretty new to me.

PR: Which has been the most special book you have written?

WD: I tend to love the most recent one. At the moment it is Return of a King. The one everyone likes here is The Last Mughal and City of Djinns. I wrote Djinns when I was really young (24 years old). You always find these kids who arrive at St Stephen’s or Hindu College from Bengal or Goa and they don’t want to be in Delhi. But they read that book and they go exploring and they find the old mosques. Every few weeks, even now 20 years later, I get an email from some kids saying how they visited Delhi and found the old underground passages. In the West, the one they really like is From the Holy Mountain. The one I was most obsessed by, although I think it’s the most imperfect book because it’s too long and heavy and needed to be edited, was White Mughals. (Dalrymple spent five years ‘madly’ researching for the book.)

PR: Your latest literary offering, Return of a King, has made it to the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize longlist. How hopeful are you, considering all your books have received recognition?

WD: This is the one prize that has always eluded me. This is the fourth time I’ve been on the longlist. All three previous times, I never made it to the shortlist. It’s a strange form of torture. Let’s see how it goes. (On September 30, the shortlist for the Samuel Johnson Prize was announced; Return of a King made it to the list.)

PR: You don many hats – author, historian, lecturer, curator, critic, war correspondent, traveller. Which role is most fulfilling?

WD: Not that many hats! It’s really one hat with lots of different corners. Fulfilling, there is no question, is writing books, but it’s also the one that’s hardest work. And it’s nice to vary with the other stuff. Writing that big a history book is a project spanning five years and it’s enormously hard work, it’s real grind and gruel and miserable at various points. But at the end of it, if the book does well and receives good reviews and everyone buys it, it’s the most fulfilling. Journalism is the opposite from that. It’s not difficult to do. It’s fun and whacky and you can have a good time doing it. I still am a journalist. The ideal thing is to spend the three-four-five year grind doing a big book and then spend a year whizzing around, travelling around. Journalism doesn’t exhaust you, grind you down. And telly is the same – it is fun to do but forgotten tomorrow. What’s nice about books is that they weirdly have this sort of time-death charge thing whereby you can write a book like City of Djinns and you can get an email 20 years later. So in terms of fulfillment, no question – books.

PR: The Jaipur Literary Festival will be celebrating its tenth anniversary next January. How do you feel about it growing from 14 attendees in 2004 to about a quarter of a million in 2013?

WD: I’m very proud of it. There were years when we couldn’t keep up with the crowds. By last year, we’d sorted out the problem with overcrowding. Last year was a big success, we had enough seats for everyone. I’m really proud of it. India’s given so much to me. This is what I have given back.

PR: Ralph Fiennes is expected to star in and direct the cinematic version of White Mughals. Are you going to be closely involved with the movie’s production, including writing the screenplay?

WD: No, I’m not. I do not write screenplays. I will be advising. What you do is you choose who you sell it to. It’s got an intriguing team – Ralph Fiennes directing and Frank Doelger, the guy who produces Game of Thrones, doing the production. It’s the third time I’ve sold that book and the reason it hasn’t been made up to now is that it’s one of those projects that’s very expensive – it’s got battles, elephants and it’s going to need a huge amount of money to make it; kind of like Lord of the Rings, it needs that kind of vision. Thanks to the success of Game of Thrones, there’s a small chance that actually now Doelger could make the movie if he really throws his reputation behind him.

PR: You have travelled to and written about some of the most beautiful and most ‘contested lands’ on earth – the Kashmir Valley, the Palestinian territories, and more recently Afghanistan. Have these travels enriched your understanding of peoples and cultures, of love and loss?

WD: Any travel increases your understanding of humanity. Contested stuff helps you understand the news better. You can read about Israel for years but not understand what it’s like until you go see Palestinians being killed or some Kashmiris being shot at by the CRPF or see a roadside bomb in the aftermath in Kandahar. It’s good to see the extremes of things. Life is a rich and varied platter and it’s fun to get to see an art exhibit tonight and it’s equally good to see a warzone tomorrow. I certainly enjoy that aspect of things whereby you live life to its fullest and wildest. My hero is a travel writer called Patrick Leigh Fermor and he wrote a lovely phrase somewhere from his youthful travels: “There is much to recommend moving straight from straw to a four-poster and then back again.” The sensation of roughing it and then living it up – it’s all good. I think if you can amplify the bandwidths of your life, it’s all positive.

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Forgive me for not writing for so long, I've been right beside you…

Dean Young, Sleep Cycle

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Do we really die only once

W. G. Sebald, from “New Jersey Journey,” trans. Iain Galbraith (via proustitute)

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Tushi

My mother's family had never had a pet. Yes, they owned cows, as used to be the norm among most bonedi Bengali families. But you cannot really count cows as pets. Tushi came into the family when I was around six-eight years old. Her parents (Lucy and Saheb) used to live at my youngest maternal uncle's in Rangpur. She came to Karimganj with her twin Khushi and they both lived at my cousin Maitrayee's for a while. Khushi died very young in a freak accident - she'd hit her head against cement while running down the stairs one afternoon. Tushi must have cried for her sister; I'll never know. 

My eldest maternal uncle brought Tushi home after Khushi passed away. I first met her when I'd come home for winter holidays from boarding school. She was like a little moving ball of fur, full of life and fun. We became good friends. I only saw her during vacations. In fact, one of the most exciting parts about my holidays was spending time with Tushi. She would be the first one to greet my sister and me when we'd walk up the moss-lined stairs of MoniMamu's house, her tail wagging vigourously, her sharp mouth and big (almost Bengali) kohl-lined eyes lit up in a happy smile.

I have so many fond memories of little Tushi. There's one particular incident I will never forget. I was playing around with her and her Marie biscuit (her prized morning possession) when she bit my hand to show her annoyance. That was the first and only time Tushi showed any kind of aggression toward me. I stopped playing with her and sat down to read a book. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Tushi climbed up the chair I was seated at and licked the part of my hand she had bitten earlier. To make up, she even offered me her soggy Marie biscuit. What a big heart, what kindness! That was my best friend. 

Tushi shared a special relationship with my grandmother. Didibhai was never really fond of animals, but Tushi managed to win over her heart as well. Every evening after her meditation in the terrace garden, Didibhai would eat her paan and then call out to Tushi to chew on the leftover betel-leaf stalk. It was a ritual they alone enjoyed and shared. The dusk before Didibhai left us forever, I remember so clearly how Tushi wailed in front of the prayer room, as if signalling what was to come the following day. Sometimes I wish she would've magically started talking to me and told me everything she knew, so I might have been prepared...

I spent some of the best times with Tushi while living with my grandparents during my higher secondary school years. We had our own game that Maitrayee tried learning several times. But it never was the same when they played it. The final months before my Class XII exams, Tushi and I would sit on the terrace; she'd sunbathe (wearing the cardigan I'd knit her with her name on it) while I'd study. It was always so simple and so beautiful. Those were also the last few months and weeks and days we'd see so much of each other before I left for my undergraduate studies in Bombay.

I met Tushi only a few times after I settled down in Bombay. I remember calling home a few days before my paper on Postcolonial Literature. MoniMamu told me she was fine. I went to Bangalore two weeks after that to be with Dadubhai. I was telling him that I was looking forward to being home and seeing Tushi. Suddenly Dadubhai said, "But she's gone." I asked where to? He replied "To heaven; she's with your Didibhai now." Tushi died on March 23, 2007, the day when I was sitting at Marine Drive with the submariner who was going to break my heart a few days later. 

When I went home that summer, MoniMami told me about Tushi's last few hours. She was in terrible pain. The veterinarian said she wasn't going to make it past the afternoon. But Tushi did. And when she knew her time was up, she bravely walked to the kitchen where MoniMami was preparing tea, cried a little and sat down. MoniMami quickly went to the prayer room, got some gangajal and fed that to her. She gulped it down and closed her eyes forever.

Tushi was buried in the old garden downstairs, close to the garage, among the mango tree and hibiscus & rose plants. Rothindro Mamu, our family's trusted old accountant, says that every morning when he goes to pick flowers for the day's pooja, he always sees a flower on the spot where Tushi was laid to rest. 

I have said so many goodbyes in my life - to friends, family members, acquaintances, colleagues. I just couldn't say it to Tushi. But then again, I never feel like she's too far away from me. On days when I'm down, I only have to think of her  - smiling, rubbing her wet black nose against me, licking my fingers and my toes - and all is well. Thank you for bringing me so much joy, dear Tushi. I hope we can meet soon in a magical world, where we'll be able to talk and share our joys and reminisce our days of innocence together. Till then, I know you're only a thought away.

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I wrote you. I write you. I wrote you. I write you. I take refuge in my words, the words my pen weeps. As long as I am speaking, as long as I am writing, my pain is less keen. I join with each syllable to the point of being but a body of consonants, a soul of vowels. Is it magic? I write his name, and it becomes the man I love.

Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions I, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (via proustitute)

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Did I find, says Kabir, The beloved that I have become One with.

Kabir, from “Chewing slowly,” trans. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (via proustitute)

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'The two of us walked in silence, smoking.

"Do you reckon we'll live long enough to die of lung cancer?" Armin asked.

"Yeah, if we're lucky," I replied.'

- 'Goodbye Sarajevo', Atka Reid & Hana Schofield

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"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written." - Oscar Wilde

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"We consider this our duty: to defend humanity against the scourge of intolerance, violence, and fanaticism." - Ahmad Shah Massoud. 

If my generation were to have a Che Guevara, it would be Ahmad Shah Massoud. You can read about him here, here, and here.

I was sixteen years of age when the Lion of the Panjshir Valley was assassinated on September 9, 2001. I don't usually cry when public personalities die. But, I wept for Massoud, and for Danny Pearl five months later. Here's why and it's very simple: Massoud had a steadfast love for freedom and Afghanistan; Danny Pearl for Mariane and unborn Adam. And both died incomplete.

I came across this eulogy called Bitter Fruit Falling (originally written in Dari by Khalilullah Khalili) for Ahmad Shah Massoud - brave soldier, legendary freedom fighter, leader with warm eyes, and a warm heart. RIP. 

'I am the bitter fruit falling upon the earth.

Thus in the clutches of time I remain. O spring of liberty! Your grace, what else it could be But to render this bitter fruit sweet? The greatest wealth of this world is the company of friends, The agony of death: Separation from them, But since they are all together, the friends, Resting deep in the heart of the dust, What difference does it make Whether alive or dead. Out of pain and sorrow destiny has molded me. What, Alas, has been my joy from the cup of life? Like a candle burning in the blowing wind, I tremble, I burn, ... I die.'