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| Photo of the author by Tarun Bhartiya |
Day 4
Lalit’s wife, Maya, has taught the help high society manners: how to lay the table; to be polite with guests etc.
(Ketan Mehta’s title for his Hindi film adaptation of Madame Bovary came out as “Maya Memsab!”)
Lalit and I discuss travel to Holy Places: Assisi, Angkor, Borobudur.
Holy places call you. I came twice near Assisi but missed visiting both times. Same for the Meenakshi temple at Madurai; she promises progeny.
Angkor is like Rome: too vast; you feel lost. It is a lost city: imperialistic, militaristic, like ancient Egypt.
Nothing holy left. Hindus and Buddhists claim it. The site is disputed between Thailand and Cambodia. Tourist touts spoilt my pleasure the last time.
But Borobudur! I chanced upon it. On a moonlit night of Baisakhi, I saw sunrise and the moon set on it. Small wicker baskets carrying votive lamps to the Buddha affixed to balloons were set free skywards. All the children were happy.
The structure itself is three tiered: Hell, Earth, Heaven. Patala, Samsara, Nirvana.
The first two bolgias are square but Nirvana gallery, the topmost, is circular; the square circled!
The first two tiers are teeming with life, suffering or actively toiling.
But Nirvana is emptiness. No friezes there. Open to sky. Buddhas sit stony, silent, under black lattice bell-jars meditating under a clear sky.
Here is something for a poet to sink his teeth into.
(I had given up Egypt to do charity with my travel money to my Palestinian lover.)
All this is in plain prose, in All my Masters, re-mastered by Queer Ink, Australia after India’s queers objected to being featured in it. It is not poetry. Lalit who does not read poetry will read my prose travelogue on Kindle, cheaply.
Parvathy, my gold medalist student, who accompanied me to the Dalai Lama writes me about that travel:
I remember listening to the many conversations you had with all kinds of people on our Dharamshala trip. That’s how I learnt that conversation too is a form of travel and travel is a form of conversation – with people, places, time, ways of life. Thank you for teaching me this.
She said she was in Heaven on her recent Sikkim trip with her male lover.
She has abjured Anumitra. Anumitra says Parvathy realized that it’s easier being straight than living as a lesbian!
***
Talking of stray conversations, I had one just yesterday with a laborer who salaamed me. Thinking me to be a Moslem, he came to chat with me sunning myself on the eastern entrance to my guest-cottage.
Seeing the gap between his two front teeth, I complemented him saying the Prophet is said to have had such teeth.
Mashallah! he said, overjoyed and went back to digging and delving, refreshed.
***
I am never bored.
Parvathy, again:
It is a beautiful and youthful spirit that is not bored as long as there are people to talk and listen to. In this respect, I myself am old and crotchety. Another thing to learn from you.
And this is a woman half my age!
But this engaging with people tires me. At day’s end I write to Brinda:
Tomorrow will be another long day. I will play Ann Landers or Miss Lonely hearts to the world. You will be a slave to life one more day to earn your freedom ultimately.
Before bedtime, I was playing Cupid, to Parsuram, who finally left his wife of 20 years to lead a gay life. A Moslem student, 20 years younger has been cruising him for 10 years, even after marriage. I push Parsuram into his arms, his bed.
After much cajoling Parsu agrees! But I’m exhausted.
I’m never alone. I’m always seducing people in person, on the phone, in my writing. The poet is a whore. Poetry comes when the whoring fails.
Shelly Bhoil, my translator in Brazil tweets:
Don’t let anybody ruin your mood.
They come as material for your poetry.
So you are the one who rules.
No one gets to do that with you.
But Sarwar thinks this diary of lost love is about him:
Please don’t take me as your subject.
I am not your lost love.
I am lover forever but (a) very
Silent lover.
His silence deafened me! I control anger but cannot conquer it. I am not a saint. Not yet!
This Diary is self-referential. It enters but never exits the labyrinth of relationships.
‘Come out of your relationships, Hoshang!'
I mix styles. Anais Nin with Joyce. ‘Put your lingam in some thingum,’ I wrote the reluctant once and future lover, Rishabh.
It harks back to the critical thinking of my teachers: Empson’s 7 types of Ambiguity. ‘Power’ here is both electrical power and a man’s charisma. ‘Stars’ here are both from horoscopes and film studios.
I criticize myself here. The Diary also points to its own criticism.
Celio Leite spouts wisdom but rejects me.
He quotes Osho:
Spirituality is wisdom. Religion is orthodoxy.
But he is religion-ridden. He extols the Madonna but sleeps with whores.
Mummy, I love you so much. SO MUCH
- Celio’s FB post for Mother’s Day. Little boy, lost.
Adil Jussawala posts Bachelard (on FB) on Night and Day:
…the Dragon and the Serpent, all those coagulations of the masculine and the feminine, unassimilated and unassimilable.
As indeed, they are in Adil’s life.
I need an illustrious ancestor for my literary history of India’s homosexuality.
Lalit and I discuss Karma (Rebirth). I say the theory is necessary by the laws
1. Of physics: Energy never dies but is reconstituted;
2. Of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence: Unfinished things will be brought to fruition; unlearnt lessons, learnt;
3. Of justice: The wicked punished, the good rewarded.
But I am a Merchant. I see God as a bookkeeper. Mukti refuses that karmic debts can ever be repaid. But Lalit a businessman asserts:
But NATURE is a businessman.
Maybe the irony escapes him.
Rainstorm!
Power cut
The throbbing dynamo
An admonition
to my flaccid sex
I am thinking of making an Omnibus Diary of a 100 pages with diary-fragments from
Hamburg: 10 pages, 11 with a poem;
Goa: Lost (Has to be rewritten). 30 pages?
Coorg: 35 pages;
Brazil: 30 pages? (If I get there.)
I should have transcribed my daily phone messages to Brinda from Goa onto paper. But I was ill and on my return home, tired. Can’t handle iPhone, iPad.
Currently, Brinda is my Muse!
I messaged her today that I am an obsessive and dependent character. She will have none of my silliness, calling me back to my higher self.
She pulls herself down as she sees no end to her drudgery. I cheer her up:
- There is OZ, Dorothy
There is!
Writing, writing, writing.
A corn on my right index finger as at school where we were made to write copy!
June is the coldest in Coorg.
The rain cools everything down, bringing mist and fog.
I feel like Suchitra Sen singing to Sanjeev Kumar in ‘Aandhi!’ But I do not know Sanjeev Kumar’s words.
Decembers be warm. The tree cover keeps in the day’s heat on winter nights. Yet it is the coffee-picking time: hard on labor in winter. I have no one to entertain so I entertain the servants here.
Court Jester to the world! as my sister Whabiz’s sneer went. They in turn become lax: The tea caddy had no teabags this morning; no water bottle on the night stand; no pegs or hangers to hang my clothes; the phone subscription remains unpaid: cut off from the world.
They had a pork party on the leftovers from dinner – I had exactly 2 pieces as I don’t relish pig – so must have become forgetful or indolent.
I discovered this end-page from the TV manual. I better get more paper or its end of the Diary.
I also chanced upon the floor-plan of this cottage. Looked like a drawing by NRI woman artist-printmaker, Ms. Sohaila Hashmi in New York, who like me pined for a home.
The cottage is cheaply built: 12 lakhs; 3 to contractor; built on old foundations of the watchman’s quarters; stone floors, cold; not warm like teak floors. Iron rafters, not wood. But finely finished.
It is so cold I’m staying in bed. Forget even to wash behind the ears. Breakfast in bed.
Meanwhile, Delhi sizzles. Hyderabad drowns in a cyclone.
Shilpa Anand, student wishes me on FB:
Happy Mother’s Day
Mother Hoshang!
A neophyte teacher wrote his mom an FB post on Mother’s Day: Thank you for fighting patriarchy! What have these monster college teachers done to these sweet village boys. This one is also arrogant.
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