The Pataleshwar Caves: an unsolved Rashtrakuta mystery

The circular Nandi mandapa

This is a mystery from the first millennium: a cave temple with traces of sculptures on its walls, but nothing to indicate their origin or the faith that gave birth to them. The name of the Pataleshwar (lit. Lord of the Netherworld, referring to the underground location here) Caves evokes visions of deep catacombs in the womb of the earth, water trickling down musty-smelling limestone walls; this protected monument does not quite match such visions of dark grandeur, but has its own story to tell. Located beside a bustling thoroughfare and adjacent to the more popular Jangli Maharaj Temple- a shrine dedicated to a Pune saint who participated in the 1857 Rebellion- it is quite easy to miss if you are unaware of its existence.

There is very little to go on besides a sketchy Wikipedia article, according to which work on the caves was begun in the 8th century (disputed by the loud tour guide who said it was from the 9th century) by the powerful Rashtrakutas. A fault line noticed near the sanctum sanctorum of the present temple is believed to have raised concerns over continuing construction without imperilling the structure, and so the caves remains without embellishment: a slight disappointment, if you are visiting with fresh impressions of Chola glory in your head.

To one corner of the stone pit is a stone Nandi, incongruously placed quite far away from the usual spot of honour devoted to it right in front of Shiva. A rough circular mandapa in the centre of the open courtyard is occupied by another beautifully carved Nandi sculpture, and this one evidently receives enough attention, judging by the flowers and silver ribbon (!) around its neck.

Opposite the mandapa is a long, covered hall, which houses three chambers. The sanctum sanctorum is dedicated to Shiva: a golden-coloured linga with its accoutrements, the coiled snake and the pot of water suspended overhead. A little pool by its side offers evidence of the milk and water offerings regularly made to the deity. In a room on the left is Ganesha in his own shrine; an unknown god (or goddess) occupies another room on the right. Further away, almost invisible in the dark, is a small statue of Hanuman, facing modern marble effigies of Rama, Sita and Lakshmana. Voices echo within the hall, and pools of water make sudden appearances, as I realised after missing a step. Hieroglyphics mark the undulating floor, but it is rather hard to tell whether they are inscriptions left behind by the Rashtrakutas or more recent avowals of young love.

But the most striking aspect lies in the stone walls: outlines of various figures clearly mark the panels designated for sculptures and carvings, and you are left wondering whether they have eroded over time, been destroyed by invaders or simply left incomplete. You can almost see Shiva’s thick locks, a dancing yogi, or an elephant’s trunk in the outline. But here is where the controversy comes in. The origin of the temple, indeed its very existence, is disputed. Some people believe that the caves were in fact constructed by those of Buddhist faith, and Hindu worship began there much later. In a bid to steer clear of religious controversy, no “official” pamphlets or guides seem to have been printed.

Delving into the history of the Rashtrakutas and their architecture might offer some clues to clear the air of mystery that pervades the Pataleshwar Caves- who built the caves, why was construction abandoned so abruptly, what do these panels represent? Is the uneasy truce that some claim maintains peace here getting in the way of historical exploration?

First Story from Pune: An Old House and a Reunion

A tiny old man, face wizened and eyes rheumy with age, stands on the road in front of his house. He waves with a childlike smile, delighted at the prospect of meeting a man he first came to know nearly thirty-five years ago. My father touches his feet and according to his tradition, the doctor touches my father’s: in the Professor’s family, they believe that salutations are meant not for the body, but for the soul within. Don’t be surprised if you see an elderly person touch a five-year-old’s feet, he tells me later.

My father first met the Professor at his office at AIIMS, Delhi in 1979. The Professor introduced him to the teaching of Swami Muktananda of Ganeshpuri, and to spirituality in general; over the years, I have heard of the influence this very learned Professor had on my father’s life, but little did I know that I’d meet him one day.

Thanks to his son’s presence on Facebook (a shot in the dark because we were sending a message to a stranger), we managed to trace the Professor’s whereabouts to one of the older parts of Pune. Maharashtrian culture comes alive in the various Peths of this city, unpretentious and very plain, strikingly similar to every other Indian small town you can think of, but much cleaner. The roads are packed tight with shops and narrow staircases leading into the recesses of dimly lit shops. The crumbling grey facades and steep, box-like balconies remind me of Calcutta. Vendors sell just about everything from cheap anklets to strings of jasmine on the pavements. A queue is beginning to form in front of the Shani temple, this being a Saturday and therefore the most auspicious day of the week to propitiate the God whom we readily hold responsible for all our troubles. However, in the popularity ratings, Ganesha beats all the other deities of the Hindu pantheon hands down. Pink, pot-bellied and generous, he sits in glass cases, niches and little shrines in almost every street. The auto driver slows in front of a crowded temple to pay quick obeisance: this is the Dagadusheth Halwai Ganesha, he tells us.

But where does the Professor live? I don’t quite know what to expect in this shop-lined quarter, but I’m not prepared for what I actually see.

Meeting us on the road, the Professor pushes open a door in a wall to lead us into an open courtyard, which rises onto a room-like porch filled with furniture and liberally strewn with books of all sizes. The intricately carved sofas are made of mahogany; a heavy teak-writing desk stands at one end and a tightly-packed bookcase at the other. Sepia-tinted pictures of ancestors adorn the walls and two screens are rolled up against the black wooden frame of the porch. A certificate in Latin, dating back to 1938 and commemorating the FRCS fellowship earned by the Professor’s sister, is proudly mounted beside the bookcase. The wooden rafters are painted white and reinforced with steel strips: who wants to worry about cracks in the beams in the middle of the night? Despite its niggling disadvantages, the house has more character than any new flat I can think of: not surprising, perhaps, considering it was built 240 years ago and has lived through many of the turning points of Indian history, under different rulers and administrators.

Now, however, it seems to be at the mercy of the cats that walk freely through the rooms and sleep where they choose. In the backyard, the Professor shows us a concrete slab under which a well once stood. An amber-and-white cat surveys us from the other side, watching warily to ensure we don’t encroach upon its territory. A black-and-white cat weaves among our strange feet on its way to the living room, where it climbs on to the sofa in one fluid move and curls up comfortably.

“The well was 18 feet deep,” he tells us. “When I was a boy, I tied a stone to a piece of string and let it in to measure the depth. The water used to be very clean. But we had it tested recently, and it is contaminated now.” He doesn‘t complain, the wisdom of his years coming through in his refusal to bemoan changed circumstances. He talks of the susceptibility of wooden houses to fire, of the fears during the World Wars in London and Hamburg. He points to the newly refurbished kitchen and tells us that it was a cowshed in happier times, and “Gomata” used to be taken for walks around the city till his Grandfather grew too frail to do so.

Picking up the phone to make a call, the Professor turns the pages of a 1987 diary, in which irregular quadrilaterals mark off names and addresses collected over time. There is an air of antiquity about everything in this house: but despite his advanced age, the Professor is very alert and reels various names and incidents off the top of his head. Spirituality, politics, medicine, geography: he switches topics with effortless ease, making me wish I had a fraction of all that knowledge on my fingertips. His wife listens and adds her comments occasionally; she is weak after a fall she suffered last year, but eager to participate in the conversation. We eat ice cream and talk of our lives.

The long leaves of the ornamental plants on the porch rustle in the wind. The dark shutters on the barred windows seem to eavesdrop and the walls seem to harbour secrets in their various nooks and niches. AO Hume and Darwin watch from their exalted positions in the company of the ancestors. The sunlight lingers half-heartedly in the courtyard, loath to leave but forced to by the approaching dusk. This old house, like most others, is magical. It is a repository of ghosts and romances, and perhaps it’ll tell tales of us when we are gone.

To Edinburgh (Part 3)

Before I go on to the literary attractions of Edinburgh, I’d like to tell you very quickly about a lightning stop we made at Glasgow: the sun had already set by the time we got there, so all we saw were glittering shops, a very interesting cafeteria that called itself “Dino Ferrari” and therefore would have won my patronage had it been open, and the streets through a cold drizzle. We went up to a church and peered through the locked gates that led to the cemetery, beyond which rose the silhouetted mound of the Necropolis: a place that we would definitely have wanted to go up to, given our penchant for graveyards. A board outside detailed the history of Glaswegian burials, almost Dickensian in its narration of the class differences that governed the lives (and deaths) of the residents of the town many years ago. We visited the statue of the Duke of Wellington with the traffic cone on his head and walked past a pub famous for the shenanigans of the football fans of two major city clubs, Celtic and Rangers.

I didn’t see as much of Glasgow as I’d have liked to, of course: but given that Glasgow hadn’t even been on the itinerary, I am delighted that we stopped there if only for a few hours.

*****

The streets of Edinburgh are awash in sunshine, even as the promise of the approaching autumn keeps the air cool and nippy. I’m saving this morning for literary landmarks: I intend to keep my eyes wide open, to pounce at anything that bears the vaguest connection to a book or a writer. I’m being a tourist of the most annoying kind, but at times you just cannot help it.

We have already paid homage to Arthur Conan Doyle’s statue in front of the pub where his house once stood. For all the attention that the Baker Street tube station in London gets, this is where the legendary author had his beginnings. But how can you not associate Sherlock Holmes with London? This is a happy conundrum, so just try and visit both the cities.

The souvenir stalls are being set up on rickety tables, there is a lot of attractive jewellery on display, but we decide to bide our time till we find something we really like. To the right, an inscription points roughly in the direction where Robert Burns lived when he first visited Edinburgh in 1786. Further ahead, down a short slope, an archway opens on to a grey building which houses the Writers’ Museum. Lines from various Scottish writers’ workers are inscribed on the stones leading to the entrance, one in Gaelic. Here is one of my favourites:

Weird hou men
Maun aye be makin war
Insteid o things they need

- Tom Scott (1918-1995)

The artefacts belong to various Scottish writers: desks, notebooks, pictures. But my favourite is the extensive Robert Louis Stevenson section. He introduced me to the concept of stowaways and adventures on sea, and to people with dual personality traits; he was the first real writer I read and enjoyed as a little girl, and to be in his city was indeed a remarkable feeling. I want to go back someday for a nice long vacation and track down the haunts of different Scottish writers and the streets that inspired them, to absorb the atmosphere that inspired The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or the intrigues that challenged DI Rebus.

The streets of Edinburgh, as I mentioned in my last post, present a veritable maze of mysteries. True, there might be absolutely nothing to them, but if you just think back to the number of people who have walked these streets, given the antiquity of the city and the propensity for drama that such long years possess, you cannot help but be fascinated by the unfamiliar depths of what seems to be yet another innocuous tourist haunt. A plaque talks of Davide Hume, James Boswell (residents) and Sir Samuel Johnson (visitor), in a portion of Edinburgh that declined in 1790 with the rise of a new town. Destruction by fire, sweeping changes, the footsteps of learned men who contributed to history: various ghosts walk the streets of Edinburgh. It is by no means the site of endless tranquillity and sunshine. Political turmoil and intrigue have dogged Scotland for centuries. But beyond allowing your imagination to run wild, how can you, a mere foreign tourist, lay your hands on these mysteries which lurk agonisingly close?

*****

We enter a souvenir shop. The man at the counter is wearing a kilt- is this my chance to get into a conversation about traditional Scotland, about the legends that inspired Sir Walter Scott and made me fall headlong in love at sixteen with the very idea of the Highlands and outlaws?

“Do you speak Gaelic?” I ask eagerly.

“It is as much I can do to speak English,” he replies gruffly, almost sullenly. “I’m Italian.”

I beat a meek retreat.

But what a stupid idea to look for Gaelic speakers in the tourist district of Edinburgh! Most of the shops here are run by foreigners, many of Indian origin. We buy jewellery from a pretty young woman wearing a long skirt, her hair wrapped in a scarf: she reminds me just a little bit of a fairytale creature. As I engage her in conversation, she tells me she is Irish and likes Ireland better than Scotland for its greener landscape.

In a couple of hours, we will have left Edinburgh. I don‘t want to go, for no time seems long enough for this lovely city. Consolation comes in the shape of the knowledge that our train route hugs the Northumbrian coast, and I will spend a good portion of an hour in raptures over the dark cliffs dropping into the placid North Sea, and numerous rainbows arching through the grey-blue sky. But it isn’t good enough- I want to find myself a corner in Edinburgh, sit down there and refuse to budge. And then maybe a literary-minded ghost will come along and say to me:

You intend to bide here?

To be sure, can you think of anywhere better?

- Nigel Tranter (1909-2000)

To Edinburgh (Part 2)

Somewhere near Parliament

Part 1 here

I am not the most ideal of travelling companions, because given a bit of time, I’m bound to traipse around in search of literary landmarks, to visit the sites of the most tenuous connections to a famous author or a book I’ve loved. I can become quite oblivious to others’ irritation when in a bookshop or in pursuit of something I desperately want to see, especially when my chances of returning to said place hover near zero. You can imagine now what a pain I must have been to my friends at Edinburgh, that lovely city steeped in literature and history.

But let me begin from the beginning. Having fallen in love with Edinburgh the moment we arrived on Friday, we knew we had to get to know the city more intimately. Saturday was given over to Loch Lomond and to sighing over the spectacular landscape that was (atleast in part) the setting of Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy. On Sunday and Monday morning, we explored Edinburgh.

Walking down the main thoroughfare of the town where souvenir sellers were just beginning to set up shop, we heard bagpipe muzak everywhere- I know of no other way to describe it, it was so ubiquitous. But even as we enjoyed the crisp, invigorating chill, clouds gathered suddenly and we were caught in a sudden shower of rain. I was glad, of course- for who wants to see a town associated with crime fiction bathed in innocuous sunlight? We scrambled up the steps to the porch of St Giles’ Cathedral, but unfortunately too many people had the same idea. So we made a dash for the National Museum of Scotland, making a quick stop on the way at the Elephant House hoping for a table, but instead just getting a quick peek at the interiors in which JK Rowling first began spinning her yarns and her meteoric rise to fortune.

Sir Jackie Stewart’s F1 car

The museum was fascinating, of course: but what was truly providential was the timing of an exhibition on Scottish Formula One legend, triple world champion Sir Jackie Stewart. I cannot begin to describe how incredibly lucky I felt to have stumbled into the museum right when an F1-related exhibition was on- and we wouldn’t even have stepped in if not for the rain! His car was on display, along with other relics from his racing career- a trophy, a helmet and overalls. You know the pull of sporting paraphernalia- how awe-inspiring and magnetic it can be! It took me a bit of effort to tear myself away from the exhibit, but there were other gorgeous things to be seen- like a rooftop view of the city. In all the spires, roofs and rolling hills of Edinburgh, there wasn’t a sign of pretence or ostentation. It was a city you could imagine yourself living in, listening to the delightful Scottish accent and getting soaked in culture.

A quick trip to the castle gates followed, with a brief stop at the cathedral (where an orchestra played beautiful, solemn music), and then we set off through the curious streets of the town to Arthur’s Seat. Edinburgh is rich in history, and at every corner, you want to stop and dig out the secrets behind the narrow winding lanes that end in barred gates (a “close”). But we were short of time, so resolutely shutting out the beguiling invitations of the old streets, we walked by the rather unusually built Parliament to the irregular-shaped mound that is Arthur’s Seat. That RL Stevenson had something to say about it was enough for me; up the steep, narrow path we went, following many other walkers out to enjoy the glorious afternoon, to find ourselves a nook of the hill from which to see all of Edinburgh, this time not from the secure comforts of a terrace, but on an exposed slope, open to the wind. We were almost at the top of a particular ridge when the trail ended and my ridiculous fear of heights kicked in (a bit like the situation in The Dharma Bums, but on a relatively harmless hill); I have my friends to thank for convincing me to pick my way up the rock-strewn slope. Finding myself a niche, I gave myself up to contemplation. I had never been so scared and so excited at once. The brown roofs of the city spread out on one side, culminating where the hills rose in the distance; on the other, the blue North Sea glistened in the sunshine. At that moment, like never before, I felt like I was really and truly on an island; a tiny piece of land, not anchored to the gigantic solidity of a continent, but out on its own in the choppy waters of a vast ocean. It could be swallowed up or be bullied by the winds, with no protection from ancient, weighty mountain ranges. I felt vulnerable, but also at peace. It was a day like no other.

On our walk back into town, we were caught in another burst of rain, taking shelter this time under a makeshift structure on the pavement. But as the rain slowed to a drizzle, we were rewarded by the sight of two beautiful rainbows curving across the yellowish-grey sky. I had meant this trip to Scotland to be an early birthday present to myself, and it was evidently a gift that kept on giving.

As the sun began to set, we went up Calton Hill to be treated to the spectacular sight of a bright, round moon rising through the pillars of the incongruous Grecian structure on the top. We were closer to the North Sea than the hills this time, and it felt like I could just shut my eyes and find myself in Scandinavia in a couple of minutes if I wished hard. If all these years of relentless dreaming had brought me to shores so far away, by seas whose names had mystified me so greatly, surely I could live in hope of seeing the Northern Lights, Finland and Alaska? But strangely enough, I also felt slightly afraid of familiarity: of having revealed to me the secrets that had been so well shrouded for many years, and losing dreams I had nurtured carefully to get me through difficult days. It is a silly idea, of course, because there is always enough to question and ponder over, but that evening, watching the sea dissolve into the rapidly falling dusk, I was overwhelmingly happy and disappointed all at once. More than ever before, I was made keenly aware of borders, hills, oceans, people- the substance of so many dreams, almost within grasp but kept away by geography, bureaucracy and birth. Which is why there are books.

I had intended to write about Edinburgh in two parts. But as I’ve managed to get carried away and digress as usual, the literary bits will have to spill into Part 3. Do blame it on the city.

A Decade-Long Love Affair

I have been watching Formula One for more than a decade, but it doesn’t feel like so many years. In 2001, when I was in Class 10, the all-important Board Exams were looming upon us and we were given to understand that unless we outshone everybody else in the country, there was no hope for us ever. (This notion was to be repeated several times in the next few years, as I realised later, preparing for more exams.)

I probably needed something to cling to then: something to look forward to and assure me that all was well with the world, there were people competing in a crazier arena than our own, putting their lives on the line for sporting glory. Formula One came into my life at the right time. I had always enjoyed sports on TV and in the newspapers, but there was something indefinably attractive about F1. Perhaps it was the whole controversy surrounding its status as a sport, the glossy machines that came out on picturesque circuits for nine months every year, and the manner in which the hardiest of them could bounce back after the most horrendous crashes. There was a thrill in the noise of the engines and in the buzz on the circuit before the start of the race. Steve Slater’s voice, pulsating with infectious excitement, prepared you for the five red lights to go off; you put aside everything else you were doing and with your heart leaping into your throat and fervent prayers on your lips, hoped that the drivers you were supporting made it through the first few corners without incident. You also hoped that the drivers who threatened your peace ended up beached in the gravel or with their nose-cones firmly stuck in the tyre wall as soon as possible. You wanted your rivals to take each other out, get involved in ugly battles that ensured a smooth field for “your” team. There was such a strong sense of ownership, you felt you had wagered all your own money on the fortunes of your team. You hung eagerly on the words that were uttered during post-race press conferences and eagerly scanned the sports page every morning for the odd F1 snippet that was generously bestowed on you by editors who had other, more important sports on their minds on weekdays.

But I should be lying if I said it was the sport alone that drove me to fall in love with it. There was one single reason why I was so devoted to Formula One: Michael Schumacher. Those were the heady days of his reign. Winning the championship in 2000 and giving Ferrari its first title in twenty years, Schumacher had apparently accomplished some sort of miracle. The Hindu carried a picture of him celebrating with his teammates, all in red wigs. Watching the podium ceremony with my father, I was taken in by the champagne-spraying ritual and the ecstasy in the team. For some petulant reason, when Schumacher and Mika Hakkinen were mere names a few months earlier, I had whimsically chosen to support the Finn. But by 2001, I had sorted things out and my priorities were clear. Michael Schumacher was the man to support and to worship. I read every scrap of information about him I could lay my hands on, learnt the name of his birthplace, and looked forward eagerly to Sundays when he would execute his trademark leap on the top step of the podium. I wanted to be as much like him as possible. Perfect, clinical, superior to everyone else. It didn’t matter that his tactics were often questioned; I took them as an inevitable part of the sport. We had tests at school every Monday, and on race weekends, I’d study hard in the mornings (remember the good old days of the Europe-heavy F1 calendar?) so I could watch the race in the evening without anything on my mind. And because in those years, Schumacher was almost sure to win, I knew it would take me a little while after the race to settle down to my books again.

These “victorious” Sunday evenings helped me through much. Monday morning blues were obliterated by the prospect of a long news report to be pored over, pictures to be cut out for my scrap-book. A copy of Overdrive featuring a Schumacher interview, and a scarlet Ferrari F1 calendar, both courtesy of one of my father’s colleagues, transported me to cloud nine. The walls of my room were plastered with F1 posters and I didn’t have room for any other distractions. The torrid years of preparing for the engineering entrance exams in an atmosphere that resembled a prison cell in many senses, followed by four years of engineering college, I was helped and kept motivated by F1. There was so much to be analysed and written about: I filled my diaries with my own race reports, taking care to note down the lap numbers on which incidents had occurred accurately. All I ever wanted then was to watch just one Formula One race live- and then perhaps be on the Ferrari pit wall someday. It seemed like too much to hope for, but now that one of those dreams has come true, I might as well push for the other one as well.

I have spent the afternoon reading James Allen’s biography of Michael Schumacher and recollecting the early years of my F1 madness. My friends had much to put up with; they would come over on the race Sundays when I refused to budge from home, listen to my excited accounts of Schumacher’s history and his unparalleled talents, and tolerate my angry outbursts against Juan Pablo Montoya. It wasn’t always easy being the only Formula One fan in my circle, and my jubilation at running into Bernie Ecclestone was a tiny bit punctured when a friend asked me what I saw in that elderly man. But you shrug at these things and move along. You celebrate the start of a new year in March and continue to plan your activities so that they don’t interfere with the F1 season. Because, despite the lack of historic rivalries and of Michael Schumacher, there are other champions in the making, drivers to be supported or jinxed, and Ferrari to be willed towards another World Championship.

Country Rain

Rain at Beachy Head

Books that detail a character’s life, making a dramatic shift from one stage to another, tend to give the chapter of childhood a very memorable end. The one that stands out very vividly in my mind is Maggie and Tom’s tragedy in The Mill on the Floss: the sudden adulthood imposed on a tomboyish, rebellious young girl and a boy forced to grow into a man overnight. What I’m going to share with you now is a very delicious description of summer rain on the Nebraska prairie; it doesn’t mark a transition per se, but it appears at the end of the first book, ‘The Shimerdas’, in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. It isn’t tragic or dramatic, but in its own way draws out the difference between childish innocence and responsibilities enforced before time. But read it now for the thrill of a rainstorm on the prairie, and for the number of times you’ve struggled to express the delights of the invigorating, sudden showers of summer.

“One night there was a beautiful electric storm, though not enough rain fell to damage the grain. The men went down to the barn immediately after supper, and when the dishes were washed, Ántonia and I climbed up on the slanting roof of the chicken-house to watch the clouds. The thunder was loud and metallic, like the rattle of sheet iron, and the lightning broke in great zigzags across the heavens, making everything stand out and come close to us for a moment. Half the sky was checkered with black thunderheads, but all the west was luminous and clear: in the lightning flashes it looked like deep blue water, with the sheen of moonlight on it; and the mottled part of the sky was like marble pavement, like the quay of some splendid seacoast city, doomed to destruction. Great warm splashes of rain fell on our upturned faces. One black cloud, no bigger than a little boat, drifted out into the clear space unattended, and kept moving westward. All about us we could hear the felty beat of the raindrops on the soft dust of the farmyard.”

I shall perhaps never experience a rainstorm on the prairie, but in the yellow twilight today, as yellowish-grey clouds worked with a will to scorn the glowering eye of the sun, I was transported back to an afternoon on the South Downs. We started off in pleasant sunshine, looking at the crosses planted on the top of Beachy Head, the most notorious suicide spot in East Sussex. The drop down the chalk cliffs was sheer and we had to struggle to keep our balance in the strong wind. We walked on the rising and dipping grassy slopes, no shelter in sight but a disused lighthouse (closed off then). All of a sudden, the placid blue of the sea turned steely grey very rapidly, a mass of clouds gathered overhead, and the rain came pouring down, stinging and cold. We saw it form a swirling cylinder far away over the sea, then sweep around us in gusts. But English weather is famed for its capriciousness, and the mists disappeared as quickly as they had gathered, leaving the sun to dry us off.

It was the first time I had experienced rain out in the open. Away from the stifling crowds of a city with muddy water pouring out of drains, carrying unsightly debris that you’d rather not identify, rain is an entirely different experience in the hills. Brown houses dot the landscape in the distance, and their very sparseness makes them even more inviting. There is nothing between you and the rain and the arching rainbow; on the ground, the hills slope away to civilisation on one side, and drop down to the English Channel on the other.

But what do we have here today? The wind rushes and roars through the box-like space created by the buildings of our apartment complex. Streetlights twinkle from amidst dancing branches and the fragrance of moist mud wafts on the breeze even before the rain has begun to fall properly. Lightning rends the sky apart and as the rain begins to drip from the eaves, transformers blow up in spectacular Diwali-like displays. Unsurprisingly, the town is plunged into darkness.

I shouldn’t be complaining; any rain is welcome, even if I don’t wax eloquent about it any longer as my college-going self used to on this blog. Those who have been with me since my early years here are probably acquainted with my mad, impulsive description of about every rain shower in Vizag. I always think of rain as something to be revelled in and shared, no matter how large the distance. But I can’t write poetry or make music or dance, and the sheer joy of a rain-laden wind blowing into my face and my clothes and my hair demands some sort of expression. Thank goodness for prose and for the gifts of a writer on the prairie.

Indulgence

This is a middle-of-the-night post: you know, the kind where you’re left alone with your thoughts after a whole day of people, names and faces. There are evocative little pictures forming in your mind and you think they’re dazzlingly pretty. You are wide awake; sleep is for the weak. (Is this lucidity real or deceptive?) And you have to write. The words won’t take no for an answer. Have you ever felt the facade fall away at night, seen how the deepest soliloquies don’t seem so private any longer?

So because I’m being forced against my better judgement to write, I’ll tell you of an evening from not too long ago. I am standing by the vegetable vendor’s handcart as he comes ambling up, tearing himself away from an absorbing conversation to be plunged into the monotony of weighing and selling. There must be joy in his money, of course; what some of us wait for in bank balances at the end or start of the month, he sees everyday in the crumpled notes and coins under a grimy piece of sackcloth.

But what really catches my eye is the group of boys hard at play in the narrow lane behind him. Harsh yellow light from the streetlamps competes with the rapidly fading daylight. It tries, but fails miserably, as it tries to steal the sheen from pink-streaked skies. It is the kind of evening that brings to mind stories read and loved at school. O Henry’s While the Auto Waits. A Saki story with two (or three?) soldiers and a twist in it. Perhaps most importantly, Anita Desai’s Games at Twilight, studied at school and particularly remembered for the way it resonated in the head of that fourteen-year-old I once was. I used to be a cross between a heroine and a martyr, feeling self-righteously grieved at slights perceived or real, at the same time imagining that at some point, I would save the world single-handed. Happily enough, adulthood hasn’t disabused me of all my silly notions from the past: I really wouldn’t know what to do without them and without the imaginary world which, created at a very young age, has continued to be the bottomless receptacle of my various secrets.

But back to the yellow street: the young cricketers remind me of when we were kids. They bring to mind the 90s when we were children, slipping off our shoes the moment we reached the park where we played everyday to feel the stubbly grass underneath, warmed by the sun but deliciously damp from the gardener’s hosepipe. The concrete steps that led up to the statue in the centre responded to our pattering feet, at once a part of our games, turning into land or water as we chose. We were a motley group, ages six to fourteen, about as remarkable as any of the twenty other groups which must have played around us. We played, quarrelled hotly, burst into tears and scraped our knees. A computer at home was a novelty and we clustered around eagerly when one was available, experiencing the marvels of MS Paint and dial-up modems. People in their twenties getting published and winning Grand Slam tournaments were wise old men and women, and there was still plenty of hope that we would someday be famous and noteworthy in our own right.

But there is no point going back to where I must have left off last time in one of my numerous tirades on the passage of time, on nostalgia. I can’t turn back time, nor do I really want to. At this point, I don’t even know what I’m fighting against. This could be because I have a sneaking suspicion that this post is just an exercise in indulgence; I shall find out when the smell of coffee knocks some sense into my head tomorrow morning. For in broad daylight, the most ethereal fancies turn clunky and turgid with rapidity, leaving you to rue the consequences of your own impulsiveness.