The Sunflower Collective: Excerpt | Coorg Diary | Part 4

Photo of the author by Giri Rao, taken at Sarjapura, Bengaluru

Day 5

The crow caws at my window.

Ill omen.

Come Mr. Crow

And bring good news – My Parsi aunt.

[As if a counter-spell could break an evil spell].

My Bangladesh FB friend (we had video sex) got married but refuses to leave me. He is confused and confusing.

I’m worried how Sarwar will manage a child bride.

(She’s 20, he 33).

Virginity was the issue.

- GOOD girls are hard to find he said on the phone.

Good here means virgin.

What a sick society of Moslem peasants.

Thank god, I’m saved from them.

But he is innocent.

(Brinda calls him disingenuous).

- I was feeling like I was cheating you.

- I’m not a bad man. I still have a conscience.

- I feel I love this girl less than she loves me.

- Her eyes were closed with amusement (I think he means ‘pleasure’).

But it was a nice and long sex. Both of us were so tired.

[A young boy sharing his best moments with a person he loves most].

- I’m not faulting you. You are a blessing in my life.

I relent. We decide to meet once a year.

But he put the wrong address in his passport application!

- My high school teacher filled the form.

I have spent my life with people below my intellect like Daddy did with stepmom; sister Whabiz with David.

Now I’m worried what David’s go-getter wife will do to him.

He’s 77; She much younger,

He has inherited Whabiz’s millions.

I’m losing touch.

I don’t even possess a dictionary.

Whabiz told me, ‘Take a dictionary from America.’

I did not listen.

I had to ask Brinda the meaning of ‘disingenuous’!

Marc Ohrem-Leclef, gay photographer from New York chronicles gay life in India. He has an exhibition in Philadelphia. He has put a quote from my interview with him at the entrance of the exhibit.

He lugs heavy equipment through India’s villages but won’t ask help from his local resource person (translator) to carry some of the equipment.

Result: A double hernia in the groin.

He is recovering but has strained himself again and is in pain mounting this exhibition. He had to frame a lot of photos for the exhibition.

I was thinking of publishing this Diary with The Bangalore Poetry Review (Maitreyee Bhattacharya Chowdhury/ Tuhin Bhowal) but Brinda suggested publishing abroad yesterday. The opportunity fell into my lap the next morning.

Marc-Ohrem-Leclef texted:

My queer critique group just published its first book with guest writers. I’ll invite you to contribute to the next edition.

I send him pictures of Anthuriums, shoe-flower:

- Lots of phallic flowers in Coorg, he jokes.

Mukti on Anthuriums:

I have some real beauties here…Origin, Kenya. They are a big hit with my gay friends in France. So I’m not surprised you have sent [the photos on WhatsApp].

The Diary grows by accretion.

- A siltation (as of a dam by a river)?

Saina the Cook takes good care of me. Gives me warm water with breakfast, unasked, on a cold day. She was chef Osman’s understudy in the great house.

Lality wryly said

- She takes good care of herself.

She taught her son to cook. He works in Kuwait.

She coughed into the food.

I told Lalit.

- The labor is unionized. It’s beyond my jurisdiction to make them take mandatory T.B. (Tuberculosis) tests.

Whabiz, my sister, died of childhood T.B., caught from a boarding school ayah in Panchgani, which recurred in the Chicago cold.

The estate electrician, Vishwanath, pretends to be a pujari, a temple priest, and a vegetarian.But he is big and strong. I call him Hanuman. He will drive me back to Bangalore.

He brews tea for guests but won’t for his wife! He loves to joke. Mukti says I have a gift to make men laugh. I can even make them cry: Ask Sarwar.

In spite of incessant rain, and the power cuts, it’s an excellent writing retreat.

- Thank you for giving me this piece of heaven, I write Lalit.

The house is all wrong for this cold climate.

Wood floors and rafters would keep us warm.

Here we walk on cheaper but cold stone floors.

Everyone loves the beauty of the house but it’s uncomfortable to live in.

When Lalit had money he imported Burma teak for floors of his main villa, Blaze House.

When he complained on Facebook for being swindled an uncle surfaced on his page asking him who was I to give him advice.

The rich fear being swindled!

Communication is a silent meeting.

Just as a river disappears into the ocean,

Two beings disappear from each other

without holding anything back. Two

flames approach and suddenly become

a flame. No one loses anything and both

gain from each other’s treasures.

- Osho

Posted on FB by Celio Leite, who has read 100’s of Osho lectures.

‘You are my mirror/ To see my profile’, Sarwar writes me.

Sarwar pretending to be strong, silent

But actually weak.

‘My wife is my body.’ He wrote.

I must be Kleopatra from Krypton.

- ‘I am with Phoebus’ pinches black,’ Shakespeare’s Cleopatra.

A bird went in search of a cage.

I am happy to be alone in this forest resort.

Freed of lame ducks.

Servants put up a bird feeder on my veranda

And no bird!

Rain kept them indoors.

The efficient management might send for a bird catcher to find birds to regale me!

(The birds have to find the food, first.)

Amma leaves out washing in the rain.

Ayya brings his room-heaters and leaves every door open.

Avocado (Butter fruit, here) detoxed me.

I share my breakfast with the lady cook.

This holiday, this diary is mental de-toxification.

Guacamole is infant food here: mixed with milk and sugar; not olive oil and spices as in Mexico.

The cook who ‘looks after herself’ has built herself a 6-room cottage as big as mine 3 years back on her monthly salary of 3,500 rupees. She’s been here 15 years. She used to be assistant to the Moslem chef in the big house. At 6 a.m. she prepares coffee and dosai for the whole estate labor. At 7.30 a.m. she’s here to serve me breakfast at 8.

She’s supposed to work till 8 p.m. but I have an early supper on leftovers and let her off at 6 p.m. before the dark and the rain set in. It’s a half-hour trek uphill to her home.

I needle Brinda on WhatsApp:

- How come you never send me your purple prose (like mine)?

- Because I’m a most prosaic person.

I do not have prosaic friends.

She is good mannered in her writing as in her speech, which is anyway minimal.

Why Brinda? Other jealous friends ask:

I met her at first at a conference in Jodhpur. We were conspiratorially exchanging smiles listening to a windbag.

She was the first to value me as a serious academic; published me.

Then came to listen to me give the same talk at the ACLALS Triennial in Hyderabad, at a 5-star hotel just up the hill from my home. She says I showed her my poet’s eyrie, but I don’t remember this.

On another of her Hyderabad visits, I whisked her by taxi to a Lebanese restaurant and brought her back.

Then she invited me to be the writer-in-residence a week at JNU where I horribly misbehaved because the students rejected me as I don’t toe their party line.

Not a peep from Brinda.

She wrote a blurb for my Rebel Angel: Collected Essays. She influenced Arunava Sinha to publish an excerpt in Scroll. She agreed to launch the book at India International Center but couldn’t, due to a family death. She included my 2017 L.A. travelogue in her Anthology of Avant Garde Art, a Routledge series of which she is Editor.

She wrote me up in an essay on Avant Garde Indian Poetry with the Hungryalist Binoy Majumdar and Kolatkar which is high praise indeed.

She agreed to be my travelling companion to Brazil (because I need one at 75) without missing a beat.

She gave me an introduction to her engineer cousin Dr. Bose in Hamburg when I recently was invited there to read at the Hamburg Indian Week, November 2021. (His wife is from Bombay and was taught poetry by my friend Saleem Peeradina at Sophia College).

So why not Brinda?

All her gay male Bengali MPhil students have written on me.

It’s an Indian cottage industry!

Now we are on WhatsApp every single day.

I am an obsessive and dependent personality.

She’s having none of it.

She calls me back daily to my higher self.

She is born on the Cancer-Leo cusp.

I am Cancerian by Moon Sign.

We suffer setbacks on the job.

But like mine her time has come.

Her CPI politics doesn’t find favor with the current dispensation. (Her father was an elected Left Front Member of Parliament from Calcutta).

But she does not parrot the party doxa.

She stood up to the Me-Too feminists in a well-documented riposte in Café’ Dissensus online. It was then I understood her well. Before this I had only chanced upon stray book and film reviews by her.

Unlike me, she does not forgive her enemies.

Anais Nin had envisaged cyber cafés.

She poetically called the webpage: café in space.

She wept over real love in her diaries.

I weep over my virtual FB loves here: Sarwar, Celio.

More fool me.

I have hit on Brinda’s student Suchismoto.

(Immaculate Smile, in Bangla) on WhatsApp.

Brinda advised caution.

I see he has a new friend in Berlin, where he is a 3-month research scholar. He looks sweetly happy.

Celio Leite, my Brazil FB friend, who rejected me has 3 faces: Religious, Philosophic and Legalistic. It was this last face that saw through my pretense of Sufi love when in reality I had the hots for him.

Virtual loves seldom become real loves.

But Sarwar won’t let me go.

He has a child’s heart.

You cannot break a child’s heart.

Anais Nin used to burnish her faux Socialist credentials (she slept with workmen) with her story ‘Mouse’, on her Paris maid’s abortion.

I have no hope of being believed if I pull her stunt, here!

Tipu Sultan has a bad press.

But he freed the forest tribals from sub-human lives by converting them to Islam.

True he burnt pepper and teak in Coorg to conquer the feudal martial kodavas.

Osman’s wife dresses like a Kodagu Hindu housewife: mangalsutra on neck and nose-pin in the right nostril to signal her married status. She drapes her sari: kodava style but covers her head with the pallu like Moslem women.

Sarwar’s Bangladeshi Moslem wife also traditionally covers her head. Men are allowed to dress in the latest American fashion. The reluctance of feudalism to let go its grasp. Sarwar had a shot at modernity with me.

He talks obsessively of ‘soul’ with me.

The Sufi ‘ruh’

Body is ‘nafs’. Wife is the body

Make friend the soulmate

And so it is in traditional society

No one is cheating anyone

Simple.

Tagore did not feel bad availing of Victoria Ocampo’s hospitality in Argentine!

Why should I!?

- But I’m not Tagore

But then, I’m teacher: Guru Bhakti, Guru Dakshina.

Did Tagore have sex with Victoria?