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| Plaque to commemorate 18 queer individuals killed in the Netherlands in the 1730s, at Utrecht |
Day 2
Giri watches the stars on his terrace with naked eye.
He does astronomy.
I gift him a telescope.
I read the heavy stars
I do astrology!
4 a.m.: Lost sleep
5.20 a.m.: Sunrise
As if on cue a beautiful birdsong at my window
No sight of sun or stars at my thickly wooded eastern veranda
I lie in bed thinking of you-
The last line of a future poem suggests itself to me.
The rest of the poem, its body escapes me.
I send Lalit (my host) the Woman Canto and 2 poems on Father/Mother since I knew his parents.
“But I, being poor, have only my dreams;”
But, of course, Lalit only reads prose!
The majordomo is asked to buy me Jio Dongle which will reactivate my 4g Chinese phone.
All the servants suffer respiratory illness here.
Connect me to the world.
Alas! Sale of Dongle suspended till 5g bandwidth is introduced.
No connectivity!
The morning walk brought a bonanza.
The uphill road opens out on a football field.
A vision of three black laborers’ boys in football drag.
First there was One
Then three
Then there were none…
The disappearing act
The sweet cheat gone
The eternal metaphor for the gay life!
En route to Coorg I gave the glad eye to a young bearded driver of a road-roller on the road repair gang.
He bent down to peer from his high perch as I looked up beseeching from my host’s low-slung car…
Lalit donated his land for a municipal school for the out-of-state coffee plantation workers’ children.
The labor is unionized. The union is from CPI (M), Kerala.
The majordomo gets 12,000 monthly plus free accommodation for an 18 hour day.
He has no high school education, only attended primary school. Yet he speaks 3 South Indian languages plus basic English.
He is a jack of all trades.
Like my lover Abhishek who chose to be a farmer after a science and humanities university education the majordomo is outdoorsy and hands-on.
Jack of all trades.
Day 3
Another long day
Full of servants.
I just want to be left alone.
I am the bridge between master and servant in this still feudal society.
Lalit is my student; I was his private tutor in school. But I was in his employ. He loves me.
His employees love him and refused to join the Marxist union. So his employees love me too. I’m invited to their homes: Pandi (pork).
Lalit is Leo, Pisces rising.
Lalit is power, money, fame.
Pisces is the Creator: homes, houses, businesses.
I have Pisces rising in my chart.
Anais Nin, my step mother, my youngest sister:
All Pisces born. Slaves of Love. Whores.
Writing redeemed Nin. For others, there is no redemption.
Rainy, cold night.
No power, but generator at ready
Until Lalit bought the estate in 1980, the village had no power.
Lalit electrified the village in a day.
Money is power.
I should weave this into the diary.
The maintenance of power.
My father’s fate, his failed legacy.
My friend being cheated in business; there is a link.
Spirituality ALONE rids men of greed, envy.
False village spirituality:
The snakeman who subdues snakes.
Protects villagers from snakes.
The cold lessens their venom!
My Iranian feminist student Nasim Basiri writes me a WhatsApp message from Cornwallis, Oregon:
What a poetic place to write.
How long will you stay?
Love your imagination.
What imagination? I say.
Blaming the stars for my own fault!
Nasim Basiri made me famous among Iranian academicians in America.
She tells young Iranian poets to emulate me; to write in simple language.
I’m a moral writer; though I am an immoralist. Which is to say I’m never immoral.
Today after night-rain the bird seems to have caught a cold and refused to sing at dawn!
Before bedtime last night Mukti and I had a long WhatsApp exchange.
She (a businesswoman): Strategy is meant for success. If strategy does not succeed it is alas not fit to be called so.
I: May be, to be successful it needs to be applied to the right situation.
She: The situation is called right only after the strategy succeeds: Failed strategy, is failed situation. [I accept defeat.] I: You are a politician; I, a mere poet!
“Opposition is true friendship.” Blake
Mukti was my Poona student.
We kept in touch 40 years.
She will move to France after 30 years in Goa with her French husband.
She invited me to enjoy her bungalow, for a full forty-day period, before she sold it.
The generosity between friends.
Mr. Das, estate Manager for 40 years, whose distinction it is to be the only one to be gored by a boar, tells me of his boss, my student’s power and pomp in bygone days:
- He would come with a 10-car-motorcade, like a politician.
- If I had so much money I’d go mad, I say. Mr. Das sizes me up immediately:
- Your thinking is different, he tells me.
He is an Andhra man.
Andhra men are quick learners; see their NRI success as techies in the US.
Mr. Das has entertained Shyam Benegal on the estate. He came to record, bird-song for ‘Ankur’ which Lalit’s father funded.
Mr. Das has learnt from the School of Life.
‘This morning I met morning’s minion’
The snakes of Coorg have excited everyone.
Parvathy writes:
I was born under the sign of the snake in the Malayalam calendar.
Parvathy was the ex-girlfriend of Anumitra who runs Edible Archives, the Goa restaurant.
I write Anumitra:
A diary is an Edible Archive of memory. It contains besides observations in the present, coincidences or correspondences between people and events in the past.
A rich Poona parsi boy wants dope on a Hyderabad socialite he is dazzled by.
Inherited wealth does not impress me.
Heartlessness of the rich disgusts me.
I explain Djuna Barnes Nightwood to the lesbian Anumitra:
The theme of the book is false pretending to aristocracy in a plebian world; by denial of the same-sex feeling in a modern, loveless world.
I warn against Barnes’ long sentences:
But once you understand that Barnes finds five comparisons for the one thing she mentions at the start of her sentence you get carried away on the sentence as on a river…
At the center is a gay Dr. O’ Connor who is a gynecologist dressed as a woman who gives this poor, harassed lesbian the secret of birth and death. But like me he cannot know love because he is not a woman.
[I wept as I wrote this]
Homosexuals who suppress youthful homosexuality find it breaks out in life later, which ruins their life and of people they have fooled e.g. wives and children.
In the book the girl who denies the girlfriend goes mad at the end, howls like a dog...
It is not the fault of homosexuals.
But of heterosexual society that compels us to conform.
Compulsory heterosexuality!
This is the case with:
Celio
Rishabh
Parvathy
Djuna Barnes refused to know that other lesbian Anais Nin though both lived in New York city. Nin and Barnes wrote 20 years apart.
A lesbian novel of 1920’s Paris can only speak to today’s lesbians in India, in a limited way.
Something I did not understand as a once and future Nin fan.
On Tagore’s birthday: 8 May
"Dream is a wife who must talk
Sleep is the husband who silently suffers"
- ‘Stray Birds’
Long day of discussions
Sarwar resurfaces, still clingy.
Says his mistake was to ask for bike repair money
I forgive him.
I’m proud I did not use harsh language, suppressed my anger. Best of all, I did not reject him as Celio did me.
But I can afford this distraction; others are busy with their own lives.
Lalit, a huge successful businessman is humanized by his losses.
We discuss karma.
He thinks connection lasting 40 years in absentia (!) is definitely karmic.
We fulfill each other’s needs: Mine for pampering, his for philosophy.
Talk about being pampered:I teach the house help to make guacamole, and eat pork sent by the best chef in town with homemade rotis.
Heaven!
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