a girl named Battle.

Introduction.
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Battle and a boy named Rust, two children destined to meet each other but were gifted with very different yet unusual circumstances. Battle grew up in a tall building full of people of considerable wealth and oppurtunity. Despite an early inclination towards playful tantrums and kicking good times in mudpits, her parents silenced her to a vast schedule of lessons, forcing her to spend her days with a book balanced on her head while she gurgled french, ate with a salad fork, rode white horses, and played wronged virgins in lackluster balletic performances. She often cried in the evening for reasons largely unknown to herself, but she derived some pleasure in watching old war footage in her grandfather's secret study where he sipped brandy, smoked his forbidden pipe and eyed his vast collection of photographs featuring fat Victorian beauties.

Rust literally grew up in the underground, in an abandoned loop of subway track where a large tribe of
urban gypsies and mystical vagabonds set up camp. His mother was a noted clairvoyant who made peculiar candles that could make or break the fortune of those who dared to light them. His father, despite an uncanny resemblance to Rasputin, had a successful career in vaudeville as an acrobat and comic, but he harbored a secret talent for transformation with the help of a magical tambourine. Very few ever witnessed the miracle. Rust himself never saw this particular trick, though he once caught an indirect glimpse of it, seeing his father's silhouette against a bonfire morph into beasts, bird, and curious pieces of furniture.

Needless to say, Rust grew up in an unusual neighborhood, full of communal festivities and spontaneous chanting. But sometimes, Rush would find himself in a nook near the surface, contemplating this familiar darkness in his life and wonder about the mountains and pasture, the soil from which the wicked herbs and mythical flowers grew, the very foliage and blooms that disingrated when they were submerged into his world, becoming merely a familar smell by a boiling cauldron, a wafting scent from a dried bouquet. It was while he was pondering these very thoughts, one day, that the subway track rumbled, and the dust from obliterated cement rained from a sunlit crack above. And Rust gazed at this vision--this cloud of silt suspended in a slit of sunlight--as if it pulsated with magical possibility. For right above lived that other world he only knew briefly while at school or at the carnival, that strange land above where people regarded the sun not so much as a source of romance as much as regularity and routine.

It seems odd to most but it was perfectly normal to Rust, that he developed an ecstatic curiosity for the mundane. Soon after. he toiled over elaborate plans for expeditions. He scaled buildings, crawled through vents, swung on ropes, slid into dark corners just to glimpse a man sip brandy while engaging in stoic conversation over finances with his wife, witness a poor student smell a steaming pie before wielding an eager knife, admire a clerk finger through the crisp edges of paper files, and wonder at a maid using a broom just for sweeping--not flying.

Rust could not feign invisibility flawlessly, however. Whether it be because of over-inquisitive neighbors or the serendiptous arrival or unsuspecting cops, reports of a peeping tom circulated throughout various neighborhoods.
And even though they were uncommonly supportive of their son's hungry mind and strange inclinations, Rust's parents got particularly worried after an ugly incident involving brush with the feds and some angry dwellers with pitchforks, the entire intriguing chase culminating with a showdown on a skyscraper and Rust dangling happily from the hour-hand of a large clock, sixty feet up in the air. Sternly, his father insisted," Due to the boy's inelegant method of mischief, he must be inititated into OUR special way of dealing with matters." So for his thirteenth birthday, both his mother and father recruited his Uncle Boris to give Rust a special present: his first spell.

Meena Kumari

( This is a short story I wrote in Bombay to help my idiotic cousin with a nonexistent script, but I basically took an idea that we collectively developed and infused it with things I saw, felt, smelt. And the poem and the inspiration largely comes from my friend Aditi. She's an artist with talent busting at the seams. Check out her stuff. It's brilliant.)
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He considered possibilities, arriving at one conclusion: the blue cement building near Marine Drive with an altar of plastic flower and red light at the front desk. It had no name, just a reputation, a bring-your-own-whore philosophy, not that he considered her that sort of girl. He’d eyed her for a couple of months, nothing serious, an intermittent feeling of lusty helplessness ignited by the sheen of her bare shoulders. He blamed it on the dim lighting. But that night, she changed her mind, and he got lucky. He walked over, fed her the usual lines, which fortunately led to some discreet groping and a tacit understanding that all suggestions and promises of greater things to come could be realized at another place later that night.

That’s how he ended up in that room, sitting on a bed under a flickering light bulb, half-enjoying the distant longing of a playback singer from an old radio. From the window, he stood and watched people walking in and leaving, tidying their saris, zipping up their pants, and he wondered about those ladies that hovered in the lounge. He felt it too, that twinge, when that fleshy woman in a fluorescent sari with tinsel borders, threw him a wilted flower from her hair; after some time, thinking about the girl and that woman, his finger tracing that same floral iron grid on the window, he listened more carefully to that same wailing radio voice made sonorous through a veil of quiet heat.

The night seemed endless, and she hadn’t come yet.

So after toying with some frustration, a single-word text message (“coming?), and two phone calls with no voicemail left (though he practiced what he would say many times in his head), he left the room, without checking out, fearless, lost, and starving.

Everything in his head and that hotel bristled with illicit activity, but the streets felt abandoned. He walked, hearing the pulsating trance n’ techno from some of the bars, loud boys from a terrace party, and the drunken laughter of a girl. He smiled to himself and thought what his father would think at a moment like that: Meena Kumari. He thought of the fluorescence of film light flashing on her face, her languid sorrow, that thick kohl around her eyes. He liked those old film actresses. He’d sometimes imagine them in size 4 jeans and skimpy tops, their voluminous buns unraveled----you know, dressed like the way girls dressed these days in the movies, doing the usual thrust and shake moves. He actually wasn’t sure if it’d be hot.

Around the Gateway of India, there were more people, more of a scene, with jet-lagged tourists and police, lounging beggars, some oddballs peddling sham souvenirs and old produce. His uncle, being an itinerant poet, philosopher was also a nostalgic veteran to this scene, Bombay at 3 am or has had put it, “the last vestige of sinners ready to make the most of what was left of the night.” After lines like those, that reeked of eloquence and a British education, his uncle would often laugh and attribute such epiphanies to the alcohol and insomnia. One had to wondered in what brothel or bar right now would he find his uncle, but he knew the old man was probably at home, alone, with his vodka and Limca, waxing poetic elegies to his lost wife with his exhausted servant.

After some mindless strolling, he found a man selling chaat and raw mango in a stall made of red paint and wooden planks, a single rope of strung marigold and green light festooned between two posts. He went over, mentally equating the pile of green mangoes to a mountain range, and when he arrived, pausing to figure out what he wanted, he first heard her voice.

“You ordering or what?” He wondered why he hadn’t seen her there before, but she stood two steps behind, camouflaged in black, wearing a large shawl, her long black Kali-esque hair cascading down, curly and shaggy, the large glare of her over-sized glasses partly obscuring her face. But he could discern something palpable, imagining his fingers sliding behind her neck, sweeping off her mangled tresses and getting a good look at her face, her complexion.

“What do you want?” he asked her, smirking. “It’ll be on me.”
“Just order, I’m in no mood.”
“Panipuri.”
“Ek bhel, please.”

The vendor took a moment, his small, black eyes first settling on her shifting to him and then back to her; it was a confused trajectory; he couldn’t figure out whether to link them together or not. She chimed in, “Separate, please.” She looked determined and miffed, though not entirely unhappy, but he considered the exchange and wondered if the two of them—the vendor and this girl with glasses--- all could see through him, automatically presuming he had one thing on his mind, which irritated him, because they were right.

She sat on the sidewalk, not caring about the spit or debris, dried piss and dust, and ate her bhel from the newspaper with relief. He took the tin dish and swallowed the first puri, the masala water spilling down his chin, softening his stubble. He smiled at her with his dripping face; she rolled her eyes. She then took a bite of her bhel, most of it falling on her chest. He laughed, and she brushed it off, disappointed.

“You were hungry” he smiled, before swallowing another puri.
“I had Hajmola for dinner.”
“Why?”
“Long story”, she shrugged. “What’s yours?”
“What?”
“Your story,” she said. He considered lying to her, talking it down, maybe playing himself out to be more responsible, like he’s been working or was at a business outing, but he just didn’t care at the point. “I was at a party, met this girl, got a room …”
“Those hotels of a certain reputation?”
“Yes,” he said, matter-of-factly. “And she didn’t come. I got bored and hungry, and now I’m here talking to you.” He swallowed down another puri. She paused, considering what he said, “What was her name?”
“I forgot. I mean, it doesn’t matter.”
“Why the confession? You could’ve just said you were at a party.”
“Yeah but that wouldn’t have answered your question. Not really.”
“Do you still have the room?”
“Yes.”
“So you’re still optimistic.”
“I don’t know.”
“You are, and I should start off by saying, it’s not going to happen. I’m not that kind of girl. Just know right now, that I’m not going back to your room.”
“Listen, I wasn’t thinking that.”
“Really not at all? I don’t believe you.”
“Not seriously, at least.”
“Why, what’s wrong with me?”
“Bloody hell, what are you getting at?”

She took a bite of her bhel, looked at him and the vendor before continuing.

“I’m locked out” she started. “I live in one of those uptight hostels for women only, run by a former nun who’s obviously not done much since dumping the way of God. I went back and there was no watchman. Only a locked gate.”
“What about a hotel room?”
“Why bother. The sunrise is an hour or two away, and I can later say I survived my first night in Bombay homeless.”
“You’re new here?”
“What of it?”
“Any family here?”
“Not really.”
“So you have any plans?” he asked.
“I’m unemployed at the moment, but I got some leads. I’m considering being part bourgeois, part proletariat. You know, a job for money and a job for the people. Day job and night job. With the day job, I have a friend who’s starting some magazine. I’ll write for him, this and that. As for my night job, maybe I should ask this guy if he has an opening.”
“Are you serious?”
“Sure, I don’t know. I actually have fewer answers than I let on. So, what about you?” He entertained the ambiguity of her inquiry, thinking about his family and his current happy wasteland of leisure. At this point, he sat next to her, without her reading too much into it. And truth be told, he didn’t mean anything by it.
“I do nothing. All day.”
“Nice.”
“You probably think I’m professionally and socially useless. But I will be doing something. One day. I have to because it’s expected of me.”
“It’ll do you good. I can tell.”
“So you have me pegged?”
“Oh sure. Your type. Very common in Bombay. And Delhi, too. You know what I’m talking about. The posh, entitled industrialist’s son, a Cathedralite--- and spare me the denial, please. In fact, you didn’t have to make that little confession earlier. I could smell your hormones through your big brand cologne. You probably bathe in it. What is it, anyway? CK1, Hugo Boss?”
“What do you have against my type any way? It’s not like you’re poor.”
“You didn’t answer me, what do you wear?”
“Why do you care?”
She raised an eyebrow, flirtatiously, “ It smells nice.”
“ Carthusia, Fiori di Capri.”
“Never heard of it.”
“ It’s a spritzer made by monks in Capri.”
“Even better, something you can only get if you can afford to go to Italy every year, though you must enjoy the irony that guys that aren’t getting any are helping you to get some.”
“See, you think you know me, but you don’t, because you’re wrong right there. I’m not getting any. If I was, I wouldn’t be here talking to you.” She tossed her newspapers, wiping her hands, her legs stretched out, bouncing up and down as if they were wading in a pool of water. She conceded, “You’re right.” He got a sense that she must be twenty, give or take a couple of years, but he couldn’t help imagining her on either end of the spectrum as either a little brat with pigtails, or a cantankerous old grandmother, someone who’s either not lived enough or has lived long enough to lack any sense of propriety.

“What’s your name?” He slid it in quickly, aware of the awkward timing, but he couldn’t help himself. He knew she’d erupt again.
“Remember, nothing is happening as far as we are concerned”
“Chill.”
“Fine,” she smiled mischievously; her voice hushed and lowered, “What do you want it to be?” He sighed, “Very funny. I honestly meant nothing by any of this. In fact, I’ll be the bigger person and offer my name: Sid.”
She offered her hand, “Nice to meet you, Sid.”
“And your name, again?”
“I’m having more fun not telling you.”
“What’s the big deal?”
“You have to earn it.”
“Okay, fine, as one of your first friends in Bombay, let me offer some selfless hospitality and ask if I can walk you back to your hostel and see if I can figure out a way to get you back in?”
“It’s just a locked gate. And I’m in no mood to scream and throw pebbles.”
“If you know anything about rich duffers like myself, you’d know we’re quite enterprising when it comes to mischief. We’ve bunked classes and lied behind everyone’s back and if I’m still in the game, I can say that I’ve been pretty successful in duping the Establishment. You seem like the type of person who’d appreciate that.” They paid the vendor and started, and she frowned, kicking a pebble, “ I stand corrected. I may know your type, but what the hell? You have me completely pegged.”

Moving away from the streets, they ambled along the cement walls, plastered with posters for Pepsi, the face of regional film hero sporting an over-voluptuous moustache, and Ayurvedic soap ad with milk-skinned maidens bathing in Ganges-like water. Within fifteen minutes, they arrived at the large stone and iron gate, crowned with the usual tangle of barbed wire. Behind it stood a large shadowy bungalow, no lights, shuttered windows, a behemoth of fortressed virginity.

“This is a challenge.”
“I told you.”
“But not hopeless.” He pointed to a large banyan tree, a trunk with an encouraging splay of branches, all interweaved with dangling vines and roots. He offered some schemes and came up plans involving crawling on this or that branch, sliding up and down various roots and vines, and the intimidating possibility of jumping onto the roof. She sulked, “I’m just not that acrobatic.”
“Come, I’ll help you.”

He grabbed branch, walking up the trunk, eventually propping himself up, then offering her a hand. She took it, clumsily hurling her body towards the branch, slipping, awkwardly repositioning herself, trying a couple more times, before she threw her arms in the air. “That’s it. I’ve had enough. No more climbing”

She straightened her glasses, brushing off her hair. He hovered above, among the twisted wood and vines; he assured her once more that it wouldn’t take much to climb over, but she insisted that he come down. The city felt strange within the tree, the buildings levitating, the shadows looming, the leaves animated; he lingered for a moment before he jumped down.

“You know, I used to think I was a banyan,” she began, as they both stood under the tree. “When I was very little.”
“Why a banyan tree?”
“Oh not for any complicated reason; it was my favorite tree.”
“I imagine you as something more floral. Gul Mohir, maybe”
“Why do you say that?”
“Actually, I take it back. You’re pukka banyan.” She shoved him, “You’re just pulling my leg.” They stood under the tree, forgetting their purpose, enjoying the orange glow of the streetlamp through the canopy of leaves. He picked a leaf, twirling it in his hand.
“What about me? What tree would I be?”
“That’s easy. You’d be a weed, you know, a very promiscuous sort of plant.” She laughed hysterically, slapping his arm. He enjoyed the way she admired her own wit.

“It’s funny, though,” she sighed. “When we’re little, it’s always about favorites. And really, it has so little to do with us, who we really are. It’s not so much what we like, but why we like it. Honestly, I don’t think there is anything insightful about me liking a banyan tree. It’s big, beautiful, and full of mythological potential. But really, who wouldn’t enjoy that about a tree?” She stared up into the branches, “It’s a pity we couldn’t have spent the night up there. It might’ve been nice.”

Even while walking away from the hostel, he thought about that, the idea of living in a tree. He used to think about that as a child, imagining a world of large trees taking over the city, sprouting through the ground, crumbling buildings, large chunks of brick tumbling, glass bursting, and all the people picking a branch, sitting next to green parrots and shaking hands with monkeys. But now he had a different vision, a bizarre, hilarious one of the two of them in that single tree in the city, perched on a branch and probably falling asleep until they both fell and died, their bodies at the gate of the hostel, the shocked nun mistaking them for anguished lovers with romantically-inclined, suicidal tendencies.

“I have a proposition, but not the kind you think.”
“What?” she moaned.
“Why don’t we spend the next hour in my place? Lie down there for an hour until you know this woman will open the gate. It’s not even ten minutes from here.”
“No hanky-panky, remember…”
“You’re not that kind of girl.”
She smiled, shaking her head approvingly, “Chalo.”

She waddled by him, the night finally wearing on her, until they reached the building, the red light and profusion of plastic petals at the front desk still unrelenting. Her eyes widened looking at the spectacle of this hotel, feeling the suspicious gaze of the overworked females who hovered near its gates. She whispered in his ear, “My god, do they think I’m one of them?”
“Of course they do. Now be a good girl and don’t stare.”
“Come, let’s invite one up with us. We can pay her to dance and pretend we’re zamindars with hookahs.”
“They’re not that kind of kept woman, stupid,” he smiled. He, though, liked the idea of these women slinking around in their saris in a semi-coy fashion to some filmi song, while the two of them jokingly threw money at her, but it also depressed him, now that their faces—over the course of the night---had become familiar. His uncle returned to his thoughts, no longer slurring platitudes of love but sleeping, passed out in an empty room, his vodka bottle empty.

The room was untouched, the same soiled striped mattress, a paper pink lantern suspended by the window, that same mind-fucking floral grid now looking beautiful, filtering the outside fluorescence, projecting lotus petals on the tiled floor. He switched on the light, lotus petals vanishing, and she skipped around, suppressing her laughter, admiring the small details in the room that thinly veiled the charade involved in what she kept on referring to as “commercial copulation.” But when she disappeared in the bathroom, she was gone for a long time. At first, he thought nothing of the silence, at some level enjoying it, thinking she was doing whatever it is all females do when left alone with a mirror, but after a while, he wandered over to the doorway, wondering what was happening. “Everything okay in there?” In a little corner of rust, cement, and brown water, she huddled below the sink, touching the wall. “Look at this.” Below the sink, on that same cement wall, someone etched some graffiti, in neat, deliberate letters: THERE IS A MIRROR THAT HAS SEEN ME FOR THE LAST TIME, THERE IS A DOOR I HAVE SHUT UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD. Someone had taken the time to write this, perhaps spending some lost hours in the night with tools, maybe even after a paid, though glorious, session with some whore.

“Interesting,” he said. “This must be someone’s enlightened idea of toilet reading. How in the world did you find this?”
“I just did.”
“Yeah, it’s strange to think an encounter with one of those women inspired this sort of introspection.”
“You never know, “ she murmured. “Maybe it was one of those women. Maybe they wrote it. Prostitution and poetry go hand-in-hand. Remember Umrao Jaan?”
“If they knew how to write that, they wouldn’t be downstairs.”
“I bet a million people have been in this room and this goes undiscovered.”
“Which makes the few times that it is discovered all the more special.” That was the only thing he said that broke her stare. She looked away for a moment, briefly smiling at him, before turning back to the wall. He looked at the letters again, all etched in English, so carefully, so strangely.
“It must’ve taken a good amount of time and planning to put this on the wall,” he laughed. “ I bet this is the only room in all of Bombay where one could find this.”

She ignored him.

“Borges,” she whispered.“ I used to know this poem, very well. Not in the way you memorize a poem for school, but it inhabited my life, once upon a time, and I knew it like a mantra. How did that stanza go? ‘There is a line of Verlaine I should not recall again, there is a nearby street forbidden to my step, there is a mirror that has seen me for the last time, there is a door I have shut until the end of the world….” She fumbled through the lines, her hand waving up and down, as she stared at the floor, struggling to uncover what she used to know. When she arrived at that line on the wall, it felt like an old friend to him, but she couldn’t recall the last line right after it, the line that she insisted made the entire mesh of words into one complete moment.

“It’s tragic that I can’t remember it. It will come back to me, “ she said, her finger passing over each scratched-in letter. “ But how funny that this poem would be in this room, tonight, as if a part of my past returned to me when I’m now ready for a change. Still, you have to wonder about the story behind this, the person who took the time to write this, and what happened after.” She stopped, her eyes tracing each word and letter in her head, taking in each silent syllable. “Whoever it was, whatever it was, it’s must’ve been something.”

Suddenly, she heard a song, outside, one of those old familiar songs. She walked slowly to the window, gently pushing the curtain aside, following the melody to the bluish glow of a television, in another window across the street. And there she was again, the second time tonight, a jewel in her hair and kohl in her eyes, Meena Kumari.

“Strange,” he said aloud, but she didn’t ask for an explanation, her eyes fixated on that screen, that room, where a man sat in front of that television, asleep, mouth open, his arms resting on his large protuberant belly, ignorant of the glowing apparition before him. When he looked at her again, ready to point a finger at that man, he stopped, noticing that through her mangled hair, a tear fell down her cheek, her eyes behind those large glasses trembling. He gently swept her hair away from her face, but she withdrew, looking away from him, “ I’m in a strange city; of course I’ll cry.” For the first time that night, it became apparent that through all the banter and small revelations, she hadn’t shared anything of herself, not really, and here she stood, finally exposed in that foreign room, unable to contain whatever it is that she felt and thought, yet looking more and more like an enigma. He stood by her for a good minute, letting her face disappear into the shadows, before he drew her into his shoulder and held her, letting her bury her sobs against his chest.

He didn’t know at what point the night transitioned into the day, when the women discard their saris, toss off their jewels, the neon signs flicker off and the streetlamps succumb to daylight. At some point in the morning, they fell asleep on that mattress, both sitting up, her shoulder resting against his, and at some point, she woke up, probably bleary-eyed, tossing her shawl back on her shoulder. Maybe she hated herself for crying or finding herself on that bed with him, or maybe she didn’t know what to do about that night at all, spending a moment to look at his face, asleep, just wondering. Something happened that morning while he slept; something led her to that piece of paper and pen so she could scrawl that line of poetry that she couldn’t remember: “Among the books in my library (I have them before me) /There are some I shall never reopen.”

She stapled it to his jacket, so when he woke up, it would be there, attached to him, right on his chest. If she hadn’t left that for him, the whole memory of that night –the banyan tree, the song, that feeling of her hair under his chin--would’ve gradually faded as he got into his car, drove home, and forgot himself to the general rumblings of the day, and if she hadn’t recovered that lost line of poetry, he would’ve mistaken it all for something it wasn’t.

In the land of diaroamas, I experienced a bout of romantic vertigo.

The header says it all. It seems inevitable, after having watched a film like Vertigo that is so steeped in the city of Golden Gate, that you enter San Francisco and think of Hitchcock's technicolor. That really hadn't been the intention at all, when Nishant and I finally decided to make the long-awaited pre-birthday visitation to the Bay Area, with its former tenants always going on and on about its fog-awashed splendour, cafes around the corner, parks with weed smoke still fresh from the 1960s, and muses with ivy painted across their faces.

Sadly for us, there was no mysterious veil of fog. Just more good weather. How eternally pleasant and boring. But I have to say, much like the blonde size 2 babes who populate So Cal, California, weather-wise, is very bipolar: alongside its promise of sunshine resplendent eternal spring, it gives you landslides and fire storms.

Again, I digress.

So, Nishant and I planned on seeing the Joseph Cornell show at the SF Moma which quite inconveniently forgot to tour New York and Los Angeles. So, we trekked up to San Francisco merely for an art exhibit. And I guess, my birthday. But with the promise of a partial weekend in a new City, we decided to fully indulge in our roles as pedestrians with a covert longing to be tourists. On Saturday Afternoon, we arrived and walked to the Castro, where I found an adorable bookstore where I rebought a copy of Topper and two fairy tale books. Nishant threatened to capture obscure moments of beauty in its wake with a Polaroid. There was one shot of a pink town house with splay of bare tree branches in front of it against a twilit blue sky. Nishant insisted the Polaroid camera wouldn't do it justice. Spoilsport.

I did visit The Castro, which has now become my favorite movie theater that I've never seen a movie in. I asked the man at the door collecting tickets if I could just take a peak. I walked in, completely in awe of the cream-colored walls, the golden embellishments, the Max Parrish-like maidens painted on the walls. A single figure stood at the center, below the large screen, playing on the organ tunes like "Louie, Louie" and "Take me Out the Ballgame." Anyhow, every year, the first weekend of July, the Castro has a silent movie festival that I plan on attending in 2008.

San Francisco is as friendly as people say it is. Nishant seemed to make so many friends there, even this old Indian uncle, sitting with his daughter, on the trolley who inquired on the nature of our trip....and relationship, but very sweetly. We found a lovely teahouse, where we ordered chai, that was pretty good given it was made by firungees but , of course, served in uber-AMERICAN portions. They gave us each a vat of chai enough to serve a village back in the Motherland!

But the ultimate highlight of the trip was the actual exhibit that we travelled all the way up the Californian coast for: Jospeh Cornell. I walked, amazed and bewildered that I'd never realized that I could be so inspired by an artist who could be so daring without ever saying "fuck you" to the establishment and canon. While walking through the exhibit, I wrote down phrases that I saw or popped in my head while examining each beautiful diorama or collage.

So here's what I culled from the mindscape of the master:
1. radiant salamanders
2. diaramas butterflies
3. orange starlit field
4. NYC= splintering maze of glittering crystal
5. nude ship with petrified maiden
6. napoleonic cockatoo
7. extracting the human countenance from the prism of silver light
8. an uninterrupted series of exceptions
9. Nebula the Powdered Sugared Princess
10. Come Live with Me with Hedi Lamarr
11. retained crystal clear fragments of tableaux
12. "observed in her visage"
13. custodian of pets
14. lee waves in the atmosphere
15. penny arcade
16. got her job cinched
17. chimney sweepers' relic
18. doll habitat
19. saddest phase in this catastrophe
20. snowflakes in the sea
21. jewelry box of icecubes
22. white birch canoe

Joseph Cornell lived a simple life on Utopia Parkway. Art students who made the pilgrimage to his house apparently were rewarded with him sitting them down, talking to them, sending them home humbly with a piece that he toiled over, for free. It seems, judging from my own experience to his exhibit, even in the afterlife, he's up to the same shenanigans.

Exhibition and Voyeurism: monkeysoupindulgence#1

So I've been on quite a roll with this blogbanter. BUT today, I wondered to myself: when I press that publish button, does anyone but my immediate circle of confidantes (nishant--maybe my brother) actually take an interest in this forum? It doesn't make a difference either way, because if there is anybody I do write this blog for--besides Nishant who laments the absence of a dumb bestselling book in my resume more than my mother---it's me in the future, at a time in my life I can look back objectively at my self-indulgent entries, roll my eyes, and think myself stupid. Plus, any such curiosity can open that usual can of worms about art and spectator and why we choose to express ourselves, blahblahblah.

But if there is a semi-normal stranger who, while googling misunderstood indian cuisine or a simian fetish, happened upon this remote piece of nonsense, let yourself be known. Maybe a comment or two will spur conversation, keep the entries coming. You might get a new bit of rubbish with every meal, like a little cyber-appetizer, though let's not get ahead of ourselves. If you are out there ( think:cave-like echo into a dark abyss), speak up.

Consider yourself a laxative to my unrelenting narrative.
dm

Chet Baker and Heat.

That has been my day today. Sitting in a swelter worthy of matter, almost hanging like a heavy veil full of every type of subtext, while I lie on my bed, rendered helpless to its weight. I do have my computer, though. I have a half-read set of books scattered on my bare mattress: a weathered dud avocado, a half open on beauty, a sketchbook, a scrawled-in moleskin, a towel, my black comfortner, and a Busby Berkley DVD---yes, it's a wonderland of literate curio. Prior to succumbing to this mandmade-island-of-a-bare-mattress, I walked today in the unrelenting sunshine that hovers over the southern part of California. Though it wasn't ironically garish and bright while being actually temperate--which is usually the case; this time, the sunshine was armed with real heat. From a stroll, I came back to my studio drenched in sweat.

During my brief afternoon excursion, I took solace in the AC in a the three dollar movie theater. I saw a film called Rocket Science that was well written but unfortunately, it stylistically borrowed too heavily from Rushmore. Though, to the movie's credit, it did take me back to a more miserable time in my adolescence when I participated on the debate team. I similarly struggled to understand the point of all this hurried banter with policies nobody really cared about. I changed to oratory and enjoyed more success with that. At least I could write and say whatever introspective mumbo-jumbo I wanted at whatever speed I preferred.

After the film, I went and drank some dissapointing watermelon juice.

And now I sit here listening to Chet Baker and thinking of a pastiche of 1950s cool: beatniks, bongos and a twilit saxophone, children playing by a fire hydrant gone amok, Rear Window , the drizzle from the array of ACs while walking a manhattan block, sleeping on the roof, the silhouette of laundry hung on a yadrside jungle gym. I'm currently half-dressed, feeling my body gradually melt, seeking some focal solace in my little fans. I do enjoy fans. A breeze with a buzz that warps your exhausted whispers in a chopped blur of syllables. It's quite the invention.

Anyhow, while walking amidst the overabundant floral boughs found on an LA driveway, I found the summery scent of cut grass and blossoms overpowered by the heat-endorsed stench of urine and shit, which confirmed my suspcion that it's a universal truth. Refuse trumps all. It gives you a lot to think about on your way home.

Spiritual Brick.

When you are well-fed on novels, you romanticize architecture as grand metaphor for the soul and nonsense like that. I know, it's so 18th Century English literature. And in my case, unfortunately, I've never had the ability to fully indulge in its possibilities, being a bit of a nomad, having been transplanted between upstate new york, kansas, long island, manhattan, and now los angeles. I've had an attic on Oakdale Drive, a pink bedroom on Catalina Drive, a series of dormitories, and now recently a cluttered studio on Curson Ave. But while I lack a house that stands as a solitary testament to me as a person, my mother was fortunate. The way Anne had her Green Gables, Scarlett had her Tara, Catherine had her Wuthering Heights, my mother has Grotto Villa. She grew up in Grotto Villa and left the house when she married my father, joining him in small apartment in cold London and later helping him travel house-to-house in the States. But regardless of where we were, she insisted on her children visiting Grotto Villa, the original blueprint that spawned her eventual nest.

Grotto Villa of my childhood was a delapidated mansion surrounded in jungle redolence uncharacteristic for the urban bustle of Santa Cruz and Bombay. Guarded by an army of towering banyan trees, clad with monkeys and birds, the house was full of rotting paint, creaking wood floors, and an overgrowth of foliage and fauna that it could not contain. My brother and I would leave our sanitary suburbs to spend it at the tableside of my quiet, pensive grandfather and his devoted, dozing servant Dadu, while we reread Archies and comic renderings of the Ramayan, Gita, and Mahabharat in the slow, boring swelter( spiritual epiphanies between Arjun and Krishna sprouted in platitudinal white bubbles). We braved mosquito bites, the rats that resided in the forgotten hallway piano, and obligatory episodes of food poisoning despite my father's preoccupation with boiled water, overcooked food, and alcohol swipes. When our cousins would court us, the Amrikan cousins, they'd swagger, prop us up on the bars of their bicycles, and flaunt the ice cream we couldn't eat while we gazed in helpless obedience. Once, they dared us to drink dirty well water. My brother refused, but out of desperation, I did it. With a treumlous lip but brave eyes, I took a sip, enjoyed the congratulation of my cousins welcoming me to their depraved notions of sanitation. But soon after, I lay down on my bed, wary of the mice below the floorboards, looking up at the fan above me, swirling vainly against the impossible heat, and I waited. I waited for a comic book Krishna in his teal-blue complexion to come down from his heaven and provide me with the thought bubbles that would give me access to the secrets of the universe and eternity. But when Krishna never showed up and I didn't die, I thought myself invincible and made a daily habit of rose ice cream behind my father's back.

My brother's adjustment to Grotto Villa was more problematic. When my brother played a benign game of hide and seek, he found a mongoose in the pantry. He mistook the creature for my cousin Samrath, who seeing my screaming brother emerge from the dark kitchen, wrestled with the mongoose before throwing its exhausted carcass on the nearby train tracks. Nothing was ever quite what we expected. We regarded Grotto Villa, this large structure in another latitude, as a menace that we had to reckon with, because it was my mother's home; in its overpopulated lack of control, it was responsible for our upbringing in ways we struggled to understand.

My mother, however, rediscovered her element in that strange house. No matter where we moved in America, Grotto Villa was home. I often unearth old albums, looking at black and white photographs of the old Grotto Villa. The roof that I know now as wasteland of pigeon shit and broken glass once included a pagoda and a rose garden. The badmington court where my six foot grandfather, a strappy film moghul at the time, challenged his equally athetlic sons--now functions as a familial parking lot. The verandah where my uncle pretends to workout by lounging in sweats, once served as a court for aspiring auteurs to pitch their budding genius to my family, in hopes of their patronage. Tony Randall came to visit. So did Frank Capra.

Grotto Villa oversaw the Mukerji family, the way a great piece of architecture in fiction embodies an evolving chronicle. It was built in 1918, made of cement painted white with Mediterrenean tiles. My grandfather and his brother in law arrived in the house with their young wives and first-borns, renting a single room in the house, sleeping on the floor. As they both found gradual wealth and fame, my grandfather bought the house, which enabled the upbringing of his five sons and his single daughter, my mother. I only recently found this out from my father, who wondered how his wealthy father-in-law could tolerate a humble one-bedroom flat in London as being suitable for his daughter who grew up in a mansion. This gradual ascendance to complete ownership of Grotto Villa, for my father, explained a lot about the Mukerjis.

But my mother built her life elsewhere, bringing up children who spoke in a different accent, played with Transformers, had no concept of Prime Ministers but Presidents, graduated grades not classes, believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, went to the opera, played Chopin on the piano and Vivaldi on the violin, but still insisted on learning Kuchipuri and Kathak in the basement, watching Sridevi films, and recited the Bengali alphabet and Sanskrit mantras with ignorant indifference. And as this family she sustained dissipated into college and professional pursuits that knew no geographic limitation, home in America had no architectural base.

Furthermore, her visits to Grotto Villa became increasingly challenging. First was the development of the property, the jungle toppled over to make room for a complex of mansions that would accomodate the ever expanding Mukerji clan. And gradually, my mother with each visit finds the film studio that my grandfather built, the financial source of her family legacy, being sold piece by piece to maintain the lifestyle of people who lack the ambition to sustain its glory. It breaks her heart, to see something so formidable, so saturated in memory, as a commodity.

So perhaps the novels were wrong. A bulldozer levels Green Gables, the walls of Wuthering Heights crumble, and Tara dissipates into dollars and commercial development. And that sanctuary of a past childhood no longer exists, leaving those who recall its immortal virtue uprooted and frusterated.

But as a bittersweet coda, my parents recently relocated to Kansas City, where my brother and I grew up. While perusing the real estate section in the Sunday paper, my mother found a picture that she liked. It's a pale pink house, with a swerving staircase, Mediterranean tiled roof, warped Edwardian glass and a mulberry tree. In no time, it became the new Maulik residence. Our persian carpets unravelled on its old wood floors with ease, our pictures of the family cluttered its walls, and my parents now sit in the kitchen drinking tea in the dim afternoon light discussing whatever it is that they discuss. When I went to first see this house, I developed an immediate attachment. Each window directs a softening beam of sunshine onto the furniture that has followed us with our various moves, but they also offer poignant views of our new neighboorhood: a black iron streetlamp, a sloped lawn, an elegant twist of branch, a birdhouse. 4600 Charlotte Street welcomed the Mauliks the way Howard's End offered itself to the Schlegels, and in the same comparison, I sometimes fancy myself to be a Mrs. Wilcox or a Margarent Schlegel, roaming my new home with ruminating foosteps in enchanted domestic complacency.

But here's the sweet coincidence: like Grotto Villa, 4600 Charlotte Street was built in 1918, and it boggles my mind to think that two houses erected in the same year on two different continents would later find the same woman, my mother, at different stages in her life, with family. And so it is: 4600 Charlotte Street belongs to a legacy, a testament to the forgotten myth of the American Dream--rebuilding a dying past on a new pasture.

Blowing off the Dust.

So here I am. Again. I plan on taking this blank template and transforming it to an homage to a prior blog that briefly experienced a flurry of prose, thanks to the leisure of fourth year of medical school. But a lot has happened since the friendster version of monkeysoup, or as I had aptly called it: ruminations from a jungle full of blahblahblah and tralala. Perhaps, if I had to rephrase it now, I'd scratch the "tralala" bit.

As I said, a lot has happened.

For one, I started residency in obstetrics, started doing surgery, experienced a chronic state of severe intellectual/emotional/physical malaise typical for a resident, and in an act of desperation, I surprised myself by moving to Los Angeles ( who knew?). My parents subsequently moved back to the Midwest, and my brother became a "doctor"....of math, that is, earning his PhD and getting engaged to Katherine in the process. I wrote about this in an email to an old friend, and I'm tempted to cut and paste. There's a lot of ground to cover.

SO, yes, I'm already selling out at various levels: blogging, cutting and pasting from an old email, and moving to LA to feed my starry ambitions to drive among palm trees and talk cinema.

But I'll indulge you at a later time. For now, just when I about to embark on journey of nonsequitors, I will bid adieu for the time being, until the trick under my sleeve starts flapping its wings recklessly and creates a racket. You know it will.
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