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| Village Street in Auvers, Van Gogh |
(Kathlekadu Village Estate)
Lalit (Bijlani) has invited me to be his first guest in a forest cottage he built himself on the vast Coorg estate at Virajpet. The nearest town is Madikeri.
I left Giri and Rekha’s at Bangalore 7.30 a.m. and arrived at Coorg 2.30 p.m. We stopped on the highway and parts of the it were under renovation.
The dream cottage is away from the older Blaze bungalow and the later addition, 2 Trees. It will be called Artist’s Retreat. It has an easel helpfully in a corner but no table lamp for writers.
It is a Goa-style house made of Mangalore stone from seabed for walls; the roof and floor is Coorg teak, I think. The front and back verandas have Portuguese tile flooring matched by tiled wardrobe and bedstead in the bedroom. The roof is of Mangalore tiles; the bathroom lets in light with glass tiles over the shower, from a skylight.
A Malayalam-speaking housekeeper takes care of me. She will cook three meals though I say leftovers are fine for supper and breakfast. The major-domo came as a 29-year-old and has stayed 19 years.
The chauffer Ajit has been employed 20 years and introduced as ‘remarkable’ and ‘well-spoken’ which he indeed is.
He received no salary during three years of Covid-19 but luckily his educated son found new employment at a technology firm and they were able to keep up the bank instalments on their little Bangalore apartment.
I removed my shoes to enter the brand-new house as if it were a temple. I shocked the service people by asking them to join me at table for lunch.
***
Celio Leite, FB friend from Recife refused me the love I asked of him. He was polite.
It is eclipse season and the stars are heavily portentous!
Rishabh is the second person to refuse me love in two weeks. He’s known me three years. He prevaricates: Not now. Not yet.
Celio Leite posted on FB:
If the love is not unconscious it won’t ever see fruition.
Not in this life, at least.
It solaced me over Rishabh.
But it applies to my love for Celio as well. It could be divorced Celio’s admonition to himself as the cause of his failure to remarry. [He has had 3 girlfriends in 6 months on FB!]
***
After lunch and afternoon nap, I went for an hour’s walk uphill on the estate, at 4 pm.
I found the ‘quodsi’ (Jerusalem) flower, wild Queen Anne’s Lace, of my childhood.
No internet.
Freedom from tyranny of Facebook!
Long walks, rest, diary-keeping for a change.
***
I bought Giri a telescope as a gift for his being an exemplary host over 3 weeks.
His FB friend has introduced him to astronomy. The two hardly sleep!
Anyway, he is suffering withdrawal symptoms after a lifetime of alcohol abuse.
His best friend from university, 57-years-old like him, dropped dead from alcoholism last month. The friend’s son whom I saw as a child, as I did Giri’s daughter, goes to the university, where Giri teaches. The children are as affectionate to me as their dads.
Queen Elizabeth II still owns a Coorg estate inherited from the Raj!
The nimble air recommends itself to me.
The house is cross-ventilated by doors to the front and back verandas.
Both doors must be shut tight against mosquitoes pronto at the hour of sunset.
Told not to walk abroad pre-sunrise for fear of snakes and panthers.
An estate keeper of 40 years gored by boars recently.
Brinda posts a Jibananda poem that speaks to my condition:
Love Not-Love
I want you, I had said
My heart doesn’t want you, you said
Then we went in two opposite directions
Time came between us like a waterfall
Like a river it came then
And then it came like a polar sea of deepest darkness
At one end of the sea a coral-bird heart,
At the other some corals
When will time rush again between us like a waterfall?
Or when will there be no mark of time between us at all?
To answer this question we must count
The lifetimes of all the stars one by one
And then count the lifetimes of all the stars all over again. (trans. Brinda Bose)
My Brazilian translator Shelly Bhoil, Sao Paolo, writes on Celio’s rejection of me:
His stars!
She, a Buddhist, values her young son’s pure-heartedness but she says she has neglected him during house-moving and he lied to his teacher he had neither books nor desk. All the poor kid was saying during moving: he can’t study.
(Van Gogh painting via Wikimedia Commons)
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