The Fourth Quarter

'December' rings death every time it's uttered, if you're in Sales. The English is shed like a blazer in Kurla bazaar. No more Powerpoint. Bill it. Bill it. The office is a frenzy of ringing phones, window-ridden screens and people clutching their hair. I see them moving in slow motion, mouth parted in mid-swear twist, eyes staring mutely ahead. They're growing their beards, as the days rip off the calendar one by one towards the 31st.

The tableaux springs in the cubicles, to roar like a power saw.

"bhai, approval aaya ki nahin?" arre laga na bhai phone ISV ko" *beep* "kyaaa...nautanki hai.." *beep* *cell rings*.... "dammit i told you this would happen"...."i'll mail it, meanwhile you screw his happiness" *beep*....*beep*... ...*cell rings* "A very good afternoon sir". *laughter* "How are you sir?" "Oh, tell me about it..." *laughter*

*beep* = censured spattering of colourful abuse from the cow belt
*laughter* = response to bad joke from boss or client, very important

People will drive out when it all ends, to the smell of flowing beer. The official messenger windows blink and open, like hungry chicks in an eagle's nest. I think of skipping feet, of a rainbow-skirt in breathing mustard fields. And of sleepy shoulders to lean on by clattering dark bus-doors. The days are filled with shuffled realities, of the smell of hands and the colour of sparrow-wings, sweeping like automobile beams on a soulless highway.

Suburban Cricket Hives

On a late afternoon I found myself shuffling towards nowhere. The roads rolled beneath, step by step, and from the crumbs of hazy siesta-dreams I found myself walking into RCF's apologetic side-gate in Chembur, past the police chowki and the vada-pav fellow. Men sat in groups, talking seriously beneath long-haired drooping trees. Aziz Baug's smelly dark pond was behind them, dull in the day by unlit streetlights, bearing its dose of floating weed and plastic, awaiting the night's long sequined glitter. The 'playground' is here, walled on three sides, an aimless blessed stretch that I hope nobody builds on; and my hand gropes in the bag for my camera furtively towards f5.6, 1/125th of a second and a 50 mm lens.

Cricket! Limbs flaying like levers in a sprawling factory, driven by cries as batsmen run hither and thither. No less than seven matches being played here, with balding tennis balls abuzz and darting, connecting hand and bat and thrown-up dust. What concentration you need as a fielder, to know which ball is yours to catch or stop...22 yards seems an unfair distance for tennis ball cricket- every bowler will get whacked, only some less than others. I'd suggest 16 yards with an lbw rule.

I looked on from rocks behind the ground, shying away from unsheathing my camera. But life is short so out it came, and Mumbai's 'public' is anyway heedless of the individual.

I got some clumsy dismissals, including an attempt to sweep which was nicked to the 'keeper. But the shot of the day was this perfect hook shown here. It was just short of good length, on leg stump, and he swivelled perfectly on bare feet, transferring the weight on to his backfoot. He didn't roll his wrists on it but this being a tennis ball it's probably okay, it stops on you, you're still in reasonable control of the shot. It pierced deep square leg and fine leg, unless fine leg was fielding for other match being played at right angles to this one.

It was dusking. A thousand crows nesting in the green of nearby colonies dipped in the slowing air like soot-flakes. Soon it was too dark to play, but shirts still glowed and feet still dashed, for there were matches to be lost or won. Women walked into the church behind; the crows stopped in the unease of twilight; and even in Mumbai where you can play longer, the sun has to set, some time. The lights were on in the street, the vada-pav fellow's hands moved nimbly between things sorted and warm on an English newspaper. The foetid pond too was decking for the night, awaiting some cold secret, some tired movement across the surface in its vanishing glimmers.

Shibboleths for the Weak

Management is obsessed with the word Learning. It's the correct thing to say when you sit with your boss for a "so how are you finding it" review. You're learning because you get to see cross-functional conflict. You're learning because of hostile accounts, friendly accounts, failed negotiations, pricing mistakes, presentations unprepared for. You're "learning" because of pressure and tight deadlines and high expectations; you're "excited" and "thrilled" and "bullish" about the coming quarter. But when you discuss work with a friend in office you've left the shibboleths for a sputtering of four-letter words or their more vibrant Hindi cousins.

My lad, learning is your return, from the time that you invest in something. Okay, since money's there too let's say we quantify learning and money both, and that that's the return on time invested, RoTI. Now a simple question for the sham of learning that your job gives you, which is wringing the blood and marrow out of what was once a bright-eyed boy on a parrot-green tricycle, making engine noises with a toothless smile past mum's kitchen: what about the opportunity cost of learning? What about all the chapters you never wrote, the music you never learnt, the brush never put to canvas, because your affair with duties gave you learning? What if you die in an accident next Monday? Where will you account for that from, from the knot in your grandfather's lungi or what?

Hermit Snap

A Fruit between Meetings

She was elderly and emphatically infirm. She was a gargoyle from grey buildings, an impish pair of marbled eyes staring up through specs, assessing generations, tickled inwardly by naughty memories. There was once a taxi. She waved it down with a hooked umbrella, as if it were a law: 'Every waved umbrella results in at least one stopped taxi.' The taxi is decadent, but was assembled a good few decades after she was born. She smells of Ponds. Her elbows move with vaseline gloss over the maroon cushion. The meter has a pout and says 'Don't touch me'. That's more like an auto meter. I thought she would say, "what are taxis coming to" etc. but she didn't and we drove around Colaba Market and back where we started, with chocolate smudges on her collar. She wants to see a train. I take her to Bombay Central where behind rusted grills she can see the iron lines twisting this way and that. I take her to Vashi where the sun is going down, in a twilight of gold and ticketless shadow. Shakily she wades through corridors, mistaking dusk for dawn, asking for a cola, asking for a train. We buy one, and the foam is on her like brown sugar. I tell her of Haji Ali being taken down for a new one. She drops down in my mind like a neem fruit, yellow, overripe and sweet-smelling. The stranger has no story with us, no reality to maintain. In blurred office images, she went the way she came, which is never.

Damn the Keyboard

I used to have a ruled notebook filled with bad verse with a Hero fountain pen. I now have a Parker but have lost the ability to write. I can type of course. If you give me a week in a calm place, away from work and home, perhaps I could light that smouldering fire and burn out the theme of my life on paper, finally and truly grasp for the words and forge them into something that speaks. But on a keyboard? Will I lug this laptop there? Damn. I used to frame words in my mind before putting pen to paper: now I just type, rearrange, cut, paste, undo. Something in the brain has died. No thrill now of lines forming in your brain, and then the frenzy of capturing them. My fingers now move over the keys like deranged mechanic needles, while my brain, like a rusty foot-pedal, drives them. O the fountain pen, and the blue spattering of words on white paper, and the pause after a long series of lines to stretch for the inkpot with smudged fingers...

A Toast to Sadness

Entertain me, say the tamasha-seekers, provide me bite-sized pops of laughter, a hundred rupees worth before we retire for the night and set out again for a day's work.

Where there is entertainment, there is no silence, no resounding embrace of the universe's dark, speckled infinity. Sadness reminds us of silence. All beautiful music does, when it moves our hearts. Like Omkarnath Thakur's heavy, falling, night-soaked Malkauns:

'Baap kahe Meera bhayi re baanwari,
Log kahe kul-nasi re'

What beauty, in sadness. Your own bitter irons are merely a way to connect to the weight of universal music, to touch the words and notes and chords of other beings. It's in the air, in the dusking depths of the sky, in the uneasy quiet of birds in the twilight, in the emptiness of dawn when you awake with the rumblings of vanishing dreams. I think of Itzhak Perlman's tunes used in Schindler's List, the fiddle slowly clasping your heart as ghettoes fall apart and scramble in black and white. It rises as Art above our barbed chapters of longing and betrayal, boredom, conflict, whatever:

'A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is, all mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins' - Yeats

But many people I know instinctively stay away from sadness: they've somehow been conditioned to "have a good time", "think pleasant thoughts", and seek, in the hemmed-in space of an hour, "a blast and awesome fun". They walk through stalls where coin-machines of brightness beckon them. Somewhere inside, maybe, those who have a fetish for fun secretly feel a bit scatterbrained, and a bit scared to open the cupboard. If you want to spend a lifetime filling voids with pretty, tinselled , peach-flavoured wraps, go ahead. It's a free world.

'Kabhi tanhaayiyon mein yun hamaari yaad aayegi...'
..."Na phir tu jee sakega, aur na tujhko maut aayegi'

What a song: the voice soars on the thorny moor of my mind. Early Lata Mangeshkar- what better voice to speak for the dead and wronged. The moon, too, is scared. My lady, wait, I'm coming there, to shuffle alone in endless barren time-moors; to be baited, to be haunted by a whisper of cotton and silk, a spark of anket in my irons of possesive hate, and the edge of a moon-white, ice-cold hand.

Another morning...not quite though

The auto's winding over Kurla's potholes. The whole of Mumbai's headed to work on this nippy, chiming morning. Thank god for winter, even if it's a Mumbai winter. But today is one of those days when every step I take gives me goosebumps. It's a day for songs, and a day for verse. Deep into Bandra Kurla Complex, where glassy corporate facades rise and array, the words of a man from a hundred and fifty years ago are gripping my mind:

'I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees...'

My polished black shoes tap on smooth marble, I wade through the streams of strangers, all with their hearts beating, their eyes headed somewhere. 'Door. opening', says the smart elevator, and we stand with the extraordinary relationship that people share in elevators, side by side, just staring into nowhere. 'Please. Press. The number. Of your. Floor.'

'and vile it were/ For some three suns to store and hoard myself'

The ties here have come to build a career, stiff ties, ironed shirts and bulging laptop bags. It's still just 8:30 a.m. Later, the floor will be a frenzy of salesmen closing deals as the end of a quarter approaches. You're working against, time, you need to deliver results. And if you do this consistently for some years, you will get the benefits, and a solid foundation, you can even head the country! It's good for your career.

'There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: There gloom the dark broad seas.'

Tennyson, a bearded Englishman in the mid-19th century. Me, a south Indian in 2005. And words that he scrawled on paper with a crude leaking pen are spreading all over my mind like iron creepers, slow and certain, with a hold firmer than a multinational giant's.

'The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.'

'Door. Opening'. '4th. Floor'. 'Door . Closing'. The lady whose voice they selected and recorded for this- I wonder what she looks like, where her political sympathies lie, and what she likes for breafkfast. It's time to raise bids, check tender documents and send clarifications. People are trickling in, phones are ringing.

'Tho' much is taken, much abides'

Just a while longer, my dear, a little while longer, before cables snap one by one, upto the very last.

A wisp of dream, retained

Breakfast House

Morning, window-held,
Spreads before my face,
Wet with the monsoon.
The eyes are immobile.
They burnt alive a dog
And danced around its headless
Meat, opened up and oiled;
Oiled dancers tilting
Backward, drumming on
In my mind in sleep,
In a house of easy sleepers.
Then I dropped downward
From somewhere, slowly,
Drifting down like mist,
With a school of red umbrellas.
I dare not waken here
For people who share my blood
Will ask me why I'm acting strange,
And ask me about breakfast.

Unlearning light

Chowpatty beach, Mumbai, in the flaring uneasy noon of a Sunday. A constricted aperture can do what the eye cannot: ignore the flooding of light around you, the ravaging of every shape with intense energy, and wavelets bouncing off every contour, holding form and relief hostage. But with the ability to shut itself out of all that orgiastic frenzy of solar energy and incidence and reflection, all of it but for a tiny aperture, just enough for the gravity of form and the intensest blaze to enter, you have this, which I like. My camera has taught my mind to see by unlearning light.