Book Review | This Our Paradise | Karan Mujoo

                                                             

(by Abhimanyu Kumar)

Jammu and Kashmir has a long and complicated history, stretching well over two millennia. Ruled by Hindu and Buddhist kings before the advent of Islam – Mughals and Afghans – and the British, it has been seeking independence for at least a couple of centuries, if not more. The last to rule Jammu and Kashmir were the Dogras; they settled with India after its independence from British rule. Pakistan never accepted the treaty between India and the Dogra rulers. Almost one-third of the state remains under its control while India controls the rest, with the help of a huge army.

 

Sheikh Abdullah was the state’s first prime minister (later changed to chief minister) since Kashmir was ruled by India under the provisions of article 370 of the Indian constitution. He was arrested in 1953, over unsubstantiated charges of a conspiracy to make Kashmir secede from India.  Despite the promise of a plebiscite, India continued to drag its feet on the issue after his arrest and it has never come to pass.

 

Sheikh Abdullah was a believer in India’s secular democracy. Embittered by his arrest, he later denounced India; a short-term agreement with Indira Gandhi in the seventies led to his restoration as chief minister but did not lead to any significant development as far as Kashmir’s independence was concerned. Further worsening of relations between India and the Kashmiri political leadership; alleged rigging of state elections in 1987; and high-handedness of Indian security forces created the conditions for rise of insurgency in the Kashmir valley.  

 

One of the first fallouts of the insurgency was expulsion of a large number of Kashmiri pandits from the valley.

 

Karan Mujoo’s novel, This Our Paradise, tries to capture the phenomenon of Kashmiri pandit exodus, which took place in the early 90’s. Since the Modi government took power in 2014, the exodus has been used by right-wing commentators and activists as a beating stick to castigate the left and Indian Muslims. The argument they make is: Muslims, who complain about ill-treatment as minorities in Modi’s India did the same, or worse, to a minority community in their midst.

 

Films like Kashmir Files have tried to polarize the situation in recent times, by alleging a nexus between leftists and those who forced the pandits to leave Kashmir.

 

Karan Mujoo adopts a far more nuanced approach to the issue. Through weaving a tale of two families from seemingly opposite sides, he explores human complexities and changing relationships within and outside families: between religion and its followers, citizens and state; the self and the other. The larger questions concerning occupation, justice, role of religion, are investigated through their effects on ordinary people.

 

It starts by describing the departure of a pandit family, from Kashmir to Jammu. Navigating difficult terrain, geographically and politically, they reach Jammu, only to be oppressed by searing heat of the plains, degrading circumstances – relative poverty, mocking as ‘smelly’ refugees – and uncertain future. Told by an adolescent narrator, a cricket-lover nursing a broken foot, the initial description of their exile hides a tragedy beneath its exterior layer. There is deeper pain; shock at a more personal misfortune than their collective exodus. “In my own heart there was a gaping hole, a void, a wound”, we read the narrator say in the beginning.  

  

Simultaneously, we read about a Muslim family and its trials and tribulations. Poor, without means or resources, the parents watch their son slowly take to politics of violence and fundamentalism, in the hope of seeking a better future for himself and Kashmir.

 

Both the narratives complement each other, filling in the gaps, circling around the same events seen through different perspectives. A sense of inevitability, or foreboding animates the plot; gives it power: we know something would happen.

  

By the time it happens, we are almost prepared but still shaken by its impact. The ‘gaping hole’ makes more sense; brings more pathos to the circumstances.   We intuit the enormity of the loss better when it concerns only a few, not many; it illuminates the unique way in which each one of us feels pain; grieves. What happened in Kashmir in the early 90’s to the pandits is painful and inexcusable  although many theories, part-apologia, part-explanation remain in circulation: they were in cahoots with the occupying architecture of the Indian state; they had come to occupy the best jobs; they were the most educated and affluent class. But suffering is never annulled by privileges; they only act as a buffer to delay its impact.  What I can add is that when I visited the valley, for travel and research purposes in recent years, everyone I met expressed sadness and pain at the exodus of pandits: everyone had a story about how their leaving affected them adversely; there were tales of love, affection, friendships; and ties of culture and community that bound them together.

 

The sense of balance in Mujoo’s debut novel is praiseworthy. So is its focus on what makes us all human, we who share a common fate, despite our differences, big and small. It is a must-read for those looking for a deeper engagement with Kashmir, beyond the TV news and media headlines.

 

 

New | Fiction | Doom Exposition | Sarvesh Wahie

Title: Delhi, artwork by author

 

        Before his wife was sent to the prison, they often sat on the terrace of their apartment in the evenings. The sun would sink further and further into the smoggy horizon, illuminating the greasy fumes with a brilliant tangerine glow. Although evidently in the foreground, the rapid transit would accentuate the sunset with its constant movement and occasional screeches. This would also play into making the general bustle of the streets seem like a distant hum from their vantage point at the top of the fifteen-storied building. Chai, samosa, and sutta provided an unwavering atmosphere of conversation, and they would begin by telling each other of their day’s chores. Like a single gentle cool breeze in the searing heat of the evening, their conversations would provide for a moment of respite before dinner. But, they would continue to talk after dinner, and late into the night they would be back on the rooftop, imagining stars and constellations beyond the glut of factory-made clouds. Despite her forced departure, he makes it to the rooftop alone, sitting, sipping, smoking, eating, reflecting, and penning monologues to send to her new address. Although he has been writing to her for two and a half years now, he has yet to receive a single reply from her, which would perhaps steam his damp eyes. Allegedly, his letters contain sensitive information that could shatter a nation's dream of restoring its land to the unbridled glory of the bygone ages. Love was murdered thus - in the heat of an administrative maneuver for inland security.

 

Come home to mourn, / streets splattered with blotches of self./ What discovery shall enlighten?/ The unbearable rants/ scattered meticulously in verse./ Death, his lonesome tragedy/ eyes of the crew/ jibes from handsome laughs / of the stillborn behavior,/ broken on semiotic terms / with drunken reality of your age. / Underwear and shades, / contesting points of view, / lost forever in eternal jungle of semantics, / before she found the tree / and men from the womb/ sickle and godless hammer / through and through. / Practical beauty of your rage / shall forget uncertain love. / The holy purpose of sanity / down the bores to eternal stench. / Absolute purge in Greek antiquity / where you'd call things by name / dissecting thought and endless hair. / Come mourn some more! / The lies / stricken poverty of rain / wouldn't wash any sins. / For you killed the tree / nail in his heart / and coffin sustain life indeed. / Goodbye maggots! They’ve sold their dreams / to queues waiting at the / end of the hall/ for a last kiss, / soaked in utmost conformity / of words and numbers alike. / The distance is well made. / Categories are slaughterhouses for souls / the opium of the head. / Come fulfil another one of your roles, /Death! / The Love is dead!

 

Dreams that occur during sleep are flickers observed in pitch darkness. Since sleeping and waking is a cycle that repeats itself in living, dreams have been mostly described as revelatory, imaginative, spiritual, horrific, or digestive instances of consciousness. However, all these associations are unfounded because by virtue of their interpretative exercises they bridge the realms of waking and of sleeping, attributing a symbolic value to dreams in general. No, the interpretation of symbols has never divulged any truths! For utter darkness shrouds symbols and reveals them only for a split-second eternity. Therefore, the truth of a dream is to be found in the moments of its occurrence and not in the inertial stances of either the future or the past. Again, there is no tool for distinguishing between a sleeping dream and the waking reality. The experience of a dream is as virtual as the experience of waking. Even a distinction between concrete reality and abstract virtuality is of little help in the case of the sleeping dream. For any virtuality that touches the body with its intensity is as concrete as reality itself. Apart from the modality of the individual, all the characteristics of experience that apply to the waking also apply to the sleeping - a dreamer has to sleep in order to dream.

 

        She has not seen a sunset for the last two and a half years, but she spends most of her day reliving those moments with him on the rooftop. She knows that the charge against her as being an enemy of the state is untrue, so she no longer thinks about the reasons for her arrest. Instead, she has developed a certain life routine with the other inmates here. All common meals are shared with her new acquaintances, and the labor goes unnoticed in their company. It is only in the evenings, when she is left to rot in her cell, that she feels the need for a heart-to-heart conversation. His letters grew even more mysterious, when one of her new friends leaked the news that they were locked up in the jailer's office. Still, she had a gut feeling about the content of these letters, so she began to write her answers to the imaginary letters. It was unalloyed luck that the wind brought her some sheets of paper and polythene bags the other year. A few months ago, a pen was stolen from Chowkidar's attendance register during the morning roll call. All these letters are hidden under the unfixed stone below the door hinge of her cell door. If she were to be executed, she would tell some of her friends about these letters. Until she learns of her fate, they would remain a secret. Like the dreams in her sleep, they remain visibly hidden to her alone.

 

A moonless night in perpetual fade. / Hunger set aside, for a heart asunder / beats lowly as an ageless song.  / Insignificant visions damp on the eyes / settle behind the lids wide shut. / As if seeing from within / a universe in it its flaw: / Falling down absolutely from nowhere / or floating in general compliance / beckons a wordless mystery / of naked bodies walking the streets at dawn. / Shattered prison gates, / cops chase hastily from all directions / concentric to the mouth of a river, / opens up into the orgies of water, / where you lose teeth, one at a time, / to every bite, that leaves its trace / on the bare mountain back. / An uprooted tree, fallen from memory, / in the childhood closet of uniform, / worn to the apt school-time craze, / where morals were etched. / The fabric of conversations grows weary / looking for a toilet, yet unable to mutter, / for the teacher might lose it all / to the car crash on the way to morning prayers. / No deities have ever slept, / in a human sorrow / that opens into another room, / unknown, yet belonged to someone. / Dismantled toys on the ground / and a kiss marking the sunset on the rooftop / evolves unnoticed as the hair on his head / fall out from water contamination / that made him cheat on her. / Is it alcohol or the elixir of life?/ Nether, for the whole mattress drenched / and saturated eyes on waking / erode the sand down the sagging cheeks. / A pulsating heart in the cage thus creaks.

 

But, waking dreams are different from the dreams in sleep. Waking dreams originate in the everyday life and imagine ideal types of realities that do not yet exist. Such dreams are accompanied by an impotence of the will, for in order for the proposed reality of the imagination to be translated into the everyday living, it must be forced into existence by the faculty of relentless perseverance. Most dreamers of the waking resign themselves to the ineffectiveness of their will, and thus ascribe to their dreams the character of 'wishful thinking’. Other dreamers of the waking are hell-bent on overcoming their powerlessness, and so they adopt aggression in shaping their versions of reality. These dreamers are never seen alone. Gangs, guilds, associations, and cliques are their common dwellings, held together by a shared belief in the imagined reality. The groups of waking dreamers are usually groups of hostility and violence, with tyrants and aggressors forming a leadership in order to sledgehammer their version of reality into the living. Therefore, waking dreams usually lead to absolutism and control over the routines of everyday life.

 

For dreamers in sleep, insisting on an imagined reality is as futile as a mirror to blindness. For the dreams in sleep are not imagined realities, but manifest imaginations. As such, the dreamer is not aware of any other realities beyond the dream itself. Hence, a dream is real in its own right of occurrence. The will sleeps soundly in the luxury of a warm bed and the dream acknowledges all desires for immediate fulfilment. Sometimes, these desires are exaggerated, for the dream grows in intensity with the depth of sleep. The dream may broadcast recurrences of waking life, but it never reveals knowledge of waking. A dream is not aware of anything else other than itself while it is dreaming. A dream is similar to the situation of being possessed, but differs specifically in the modality of the dreamer. The dreamer of the waking tries to design realities according to the imagination. The dreamer of the sleeping stands still while the world around him creates its own realities in accordance to the dreamer’s desires. The dreamer of the waking walks in the world, but the world implodes in the dreamer of the sleeping.

 

Whether sleeping or waking, all dreams are doomed to break. In the case of the waking dream, imagined realities are strongly opposed by other imagined realities. This develops into a contest of viewpoints. Furthermore, the totality of all imagined realities is too ephemeral to sustain a living eternity. In time, every imagined reality reveals itself as a process of change or entropy. Every imagined reality either will dissolve by itself or be annihilated by other realities. Moreover, no waking dream is fully translated into the life - either life changes or the dream itself, and living thus is an amorphous substrate of the both. A sleeping dream breaks when the dreamer falls out of sleeping. Therefore, the sleeping dream last only for a few moments before waking. There is no meaning to dreams beyond inspiration for daily life. A sleeping dream breaks from waking up, and a waking dream dissolves into the entropy of the dreamscape. Know, this to be the exposition: All dreams are doomed to breaking. It is only through breaking that you know of the definite occurrence of dreams.

 

Not that they are no longer friends, but he has not attended the monthly meetings since she left. They surely have made efforts to get her out of the prison on bail. The latest developments are that she may be released for a month to put things in order before the death sentence is executed. They have been eagerly awaiting this month's release, as they have plans to secure a sanctuary for him in the remoteness of the Himalayas. They have waited at least twenty four months of for his release, and as they meet today, they reflect again on her prison-time and his aloofness:  

 

"In all cases, the question is one of future action. What is to be done?"

"I agree. We can work out the logistics of their transport for when she is released."

"Yes, that is important. But we cannot concentrate on her alone. Countless women and men meet her fate every single day. We must engage with the structure of the system."

"But structures can be deconstructed by shaking the base."

"Yes, but it is the base that they modified first. Don't you see how the entire administrative staff has been replaced in the universities?"

"They may be hooligans, but they are not stupid."

"Yes, but we can focus on individual cases and support them!"

"What about the dream? The dream of the revolution?"

"That was the American dream, sucking up the oil fields by waging wars."

"But there was also Lenon's dream."

"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."

"Yes, yes, whatever the case, all dreamers find an excuse out of the present situation of the world!"

"There is no promised land and no hereafter beyond the earth."

"Please stop being so pessimistic! If dream or revolution is not the right word, we can talk about the future course of action."

"This is the point. Dreams overwhelm the course of action."

"What? How so?"

"Nah, you have a certain idea of the future and you work towards achieving that idea in your lifetime."

"Like saying that you want to be a doctor and then becoming one in reality?"

"Yes, precisely."

"But that is how life works in the minutest of engagements. If you want to make chai, you put tea, milk, water, ginger, cardamom and sugar together and boil it on the stove. When the chai is ready, you drink it. There is work involved in transforming a desire into fulfilment. And work is all that we want to concentrate on."

"No. Only a Bildungsroman works that way. You do not go from one place to another in your head, when you think. You have arrived and been there since you were born. There is no place you come from and no place that you have to reach."

“This is absurd!! What about past and future?"

"Past is only conceivable after you have arrived, and future is your present continuous of having arrived."

"Simply: You do not work, but you are working."

"Or: you do not live, but you are living."

"Right, so dreams are for those who are lost, who want to get somewhere and insist on their version of reality?"

"So much for that! But what do you suggest in the structural scheme of things?"

"Just live, without broadcasting your way of life."

"But what about those who broadcast?"

"I don't know."

"Maybe unite?"

“Yeah, unite to gain power."

"I don't know. You can try. If it works, I will be happy."

"So no dreams, no propaganda, but living."

"Have it as you wish it then."

"I'll will help them to the mountains, when she's out"

"I'll will come with you, I know some remote places."

"Yes, it suits their dream of living in the mountains."

"No, not their dreams! Dreams are condemned to break."

"We are not presenting them to doom, but we are arranging a place for them to live in peace."

"Yes. Perhaps one day they will finish writing their book of stories."

"Maybe, let's see!"

 

 

New | Poetry | Avinab Datta-Areng

 

Prescription

It has become a ritual: to say
And follow: in the morning
You go past the monastery,

By night you return along the river.
Nothing will change if you don’t
Follow this. When you saw the holed 

Snow-blessed rag flutter on a dry poplar
You aborted your mission.
You returned to your ritual.
When the nurse woke you at 5
The cemetery overlooking your
Enclosure’s window was already spitting,
Repeatedly, on a marked spot of an exposed brain.
It had become a ritual: the cemetery asking you
To turn into a rag. This was not to wipe the brain.
The afterlife is only everything you ever wanted
To hear from everyone, embodied, being poured
Relentlessly, until it too becomes unbearable,
You muttered to the nurse.
If I don’t turn into the rag today then…
This is a threat, a horse threatening his mane.
I’m sorry, this is not your prescription, she replied.
And slammed the drawer shut.
It has become a ritual. To say:
If you are real then get me out of here.
You replying: I don’t exist, therefore you do.  

The Fear of Apricots

For Arvind

Picking the fallen apricots from the lawn

At first I am mindless, almost, turning

Them over between my fingers–

And in a single glance throw the blemished ones

away, keeping the smooth-skinned tight in my fist. 

Because they are premature and small I can choose

Until both my hands are full. The crushed ones, 

Their light scent of consequences return me to being

Afraid. The natural state, one-winged bird of wonder

That is some organ within. Do I even want to be over 

My fear of apricots? Afraid of having carelessly 

Thrown away the spotted ones, afraid 

Of holding the perfect ones in my hands, now

Too self-aware of making choices, of this desperate 

Need to choose, too self-aware of the inevitable. 

There are no negotiations to be made. 

Like throwing away what I see as perfect, picking 

Only the pocked, scarred, punctured ones, or trying

a yellowed truce. It's unalterable now. And rising up 

My head hits the bird feed, scattering their food 

across the grass. What we call brokenness is

The necessary river, you had said once, its form

Isn't solid, but the shape of remembering something 

We call the river flows right past the seabuckthorn fence

Of my home. So long of everything still so long 

To everything. Both brokenness and river so close.

Always: bright afraid like a blessing, so so

Afraid I can't stop picking. 

Strand

The forecast calls for more no. 

And when you woke at dawn– 

The thing licking the leftover vanilla 

Off your terror–saw a strand 

Of the nurse’s hair on your gown…

What are you hiding?

You were afraid they’d ask

While drawing your blood.

So you didn’t even touch it 

Or pick it up between your fingers.

You left it, took her name once, 

Then asked yourself: if I don’t 

Tell the miracle it is one will someone 

Come and say to me: you seem to have

Found it, you can have it? 

And when you cry after the doctors leave,

Inside the children’s ward six floors

Below you, a boy will sit up and mumble

To himself: Today…today my father will…

Then pause until you are finished  

Excerpt | Coorg Diary | Part 2 | Hoshang Merchant

 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!