Mr. Bojangles

He lived in a room down a side road. Or so I seem to remember being told. He was always alone but any loneliness you felt when you saw him was most likely to be your own. He was safe within his head. He may have been very old or he may have been only in his forties, but old in neglect. We knew nothing of him, nor did we want to then. There must have been a teenager once with passions and infatuations. There must have been a young man who went to work or wanted to. There must have been a love or a hate. A family or a friend. How does someone become quite so alone? We used to see him at the club, he came to the dances and always got a drink. And he danced. In worn out shoes, / With silver hair, a ragged shirt and baggy pants, / he would do the old soft shoe. He danced by himself, all night, and seemed content. But when he died, it was not by himself. It was the loneliest death of all - in public, but isolated by pointing fingers. His name was Mr. Wise, and a more inappropriately named person I have yet to meet.

'Tis the season to be sentimental

There’s a pocahontas on my table. It has red leaves and breathes the yuletide spirit. I’ve put it in the cream and gold pot that was a birthday present from the person who can’t pronounce poinsettia.

On my long-suffering frangipani, I’ve hung a delicately latticed white candle-holder that I once found under a Christmas tree with my name on it.

The carols in the supermarket inspired me to buy fruitcake, and now there are two in the house.

Bookends

Usually, when you return to things you used to be intensely involved in in your hometown, they tend to have grown small and pathetic. As Neil Diamond put it: “All I’d see are strangers’ faces and all the scars that love erases”.

But happening upon news of a repertory group I used to belong to, I felt the absolute opposite. Jagriti – as it is now called – has become a Trust and a Foundation, its aims much larger, its future much brighter than the old Artistes’ Repertory Theatre would ever have imagined.

None of this is news to me. I’ve seen the plans, walked in the foundations of the building. I knew the name was going to change; my feelings were even consulted. But the reality, the enormity of it was only clear to me when laid out in unmistakable print on the impersonal pages of a website.

I’m still struggling to identify the emotions. There is definitely a swelling pride and a triumphant whoop. But there are also other things, harder to define.

This new Jagriti – a redundancy there, since jagriti is sanskrit for awakening – is a stranger. There’s another one in my mind, the Jagriti Farm where we played, worked and rehearsed, not just for the latest play, but for life itself.

From those insecure teenage years I’ve grown into a real person, with my own self, my own larger future. For one moment today I felt all my age and my distance from who I feared I might become. It was a great feeling of renaissance.

But also, across that distance, I recalled suddenly, vividly the summer scent of grapes ripening on the vines that used to grow across the road. The December morning glimpse of a field of hyacinths in the mist. And three boys cajoling roses by the armful from the neighbouring wholesalers, for the latest of their many crushes.

Perhaps it is best left, as most things should, to the words of Simon and Garfunkel: Time it was and what a time it was, it was / A time of innocence, a time of confidences. / Long ago it must be, I have a photograph.

Looking back there was much laughter at the farm, the tears were brief and few. There was creativity (as evidenced by the many ingenious ways in which the boys sought to kill themselves with Diwali fireworks), dedication (they renewed their efforts every year, in spite of their repeated failure to blow themselves up), teamwork and faith (you needed a lot of this for the elaborate system of backstage signals that were necessary in the days before walkie-talkies).

It is wonderful then, to know that the spirit of Jagriti is to spread its wings and fly wider and higher, to nurture and be nurtured by others. And so continue for a long, long time independent of us, its first graduates.

My funny valentine

The greatest danger of a blog is that you forget you’re talking to people. You write things sometimes that you wouldn't say out loud. And now I’m writing so much in so many places, it's hard to keep track.

It’s such a novelty to have all this time to myself that I’ve spent nearly all my waking hours for the past week writing, in some form or the other.

I don’t know if buying the laptop was such a good idea – I’m practically grafted to it now, the way some people are to their mobile phones. My book lies unread, my Sudoku, undone. New DVDs lie around unwatched and my cable TV is growing cold in the wires (but this is hardly new. A friend who left town left his TV behind for me, so I could finally upgrade to something that at least has a flat screen and a remote. It’s two months since he left and the TV is still lying in someone’s warehouse).

I think I may need to talk out loud to some real people. Saying “latte” to waitresses doesn't count as conversation, even if they stop to chat about the weather.

The book of love is long and boring...

Now and then, the couple at the table next to me sound like they’re in love, but mostly they just sound like a shrink and his patient. Sure, it’s a good thing to talk about your problems as a couple, but sometimes you should just give it up and tell jokes.

He says he’ll tell her some of what he does and where he goes but not everything - but she can be sure that he will never lie to her. She says she’s thirty years old and has lost her beauty (sister, you ain’t even begun). He seems to feel that she looks like an angel - this should be gratifying, but not noticeably. He says he doesn’t want her sympathy. Which is strange because she hasn’t offered any. Now he tells her she has the longest memory in the history of mankind. Considering that this refers to his sitting in his ex-girlfriend’s pocket at a party, I really don’t blame her. He’s admitting that he took her for granted.

It emerges that this is a post-break-up meeting. He’s asking her to consider how much it hurt him. He says he’s literally sobbed over her because he didn’t have access to her life. If, as it seems, she left because she felt he spent too much time with other girls, he needs to try a different tack. She’s very quiet.

I feel sad for them now. They’re in that terrible “can’t live with or without you” stage. And, looking at it from the outside, they clearly still like each other. But there’s no telling at this point if they will work it out or let it go, to regret it when it’s too late.

For such an important conversation, they’re being too loud in too public a place.

If I was his girlfriend, I would have left him - maybe for dead - just for using phrases like “access to your life”.

Two whole hours later: It sounds like they’re getting married, but that seems to involve a lot of exhausting talk as well, so I can’t really tell.

No more reruns

I’ve finally got around to reading Hemingway. “The Sun Also Rises”, of course (what would you expect of someone with a closet preference for compilation CDs?). I would have done this earlier, except that I haven’t lately been able to rouse myself to more than the merest pulp fiction and re-reading of the books I already know too well. New authors have been a difficult leap to make - as the great man said, people are strange when you’re a stranger.

Now that I’ve self-diagnosed softening of the brain, I’ve taken on the books that I have continued to buy even if not read, as if the mere act of browsing in a bookshop were enough.

To get back to Hemingway... well, I can’t review yet because I haven’t finished the book. But for me, Hemingway is one of the few authors whose name alone conjures an entire, romantic world. Kipling is another. Hats and g-and-ts on a patio, bougainvillea on white walls looking out to sea. It also reminds me of how redolent life in the Middle East can be of the old-fashioned expatriate luxuries. And the megrims.... not even a quarter of the book through, and I’m already using that word.

Train of thought

Being anti-car in Dubai is getting rather frustrating.

Not when I stroll easily through the snarl that is Trade Centre Roundabout during Gitex. Not when I can leave the cab in the stationary traffic on the Sheikh Zayed service road and just walk the rest of the way. Not when I can get to work without first driving around the block twice and then parking in sand about a kilometre away.

But when I need to go somewhere that’s not walking distance, the cabs are spread thin over an ever-growing area and the buses are delayed in traffic, I remember the good old days of 2005, and sigh.

My hopes are now centred on the Dubai Metro. And my evenings are now coloured by the fact that construction on it has reached the stage where they have to bang large pieces of metal on other large pieces of metal all night. So far the inconvenience to me has been restricted to the closing off of the median, so I have to go all the way to traffic light to cross the road to the restaurants, instead of jaywalking as the crow flies.

But even when I can no longer hear my music, I don’t feel the murderous rage I used to at the slightest little beep from a crane when they were building apartments next door (now mercifully complete). If it’s for the Metro, I feel it’s in a good cause and tolerate it with minimum fuss. And I’m not the only one – I noted when the first barricades and notices came up that there was much less of the usual bitching from drivers. That’s quite something considering it’s Dubai’s favourite pastime.

I used to make fun of the fact that they had boards with the names of stations before they had rails, but in retrospect that was a great little bit of situation management. The boards very simply and quietly showed the results. They gave the inconveniences an acceptable name and place: “We’re not disrupting traffic to build a tower you won’t be able to afford to live in and which will drive your rent up. We’re building infrastructure.” And they remain a reminder that this is important work.

The same goes for the extensive feature articles, the display of the train at last year’s DSF, the constant reiteration of facts and figures in the newspaper. It all seemed to be just personal back-patting and self indulgence, while all the time it was a masterly PR exercise.

Even on the longest nights of the construction next door, when whatever they were doing was not only noisy but made my building vibrate, I wasn't as impatient for it to be finished as I am now with the Metro.

Lost causes

It's a scary world. Still. For every guy with a mind he's not afraid to use, there are ten thousand who are content with thinking what their friends and magazines tell them to think. This would be fine if the thinking man was the friend, but unfortunately he's few and far between. Comments like the ones on this post make me deeply grateful that I haven't yet been suckered into wifedom – the odds being what they are, I would have almost certainly got the sort that would have led to suicide or murder or at least the divorce courts. (Gratitude is a refreshing change from the other thing.) Fortunately for the institution of happily-ever-after, there is a Cosmo for every FHM.

The fastest way to locate them is to use Sheep Hooks, the terms or subjects that spark a reaction irrespective of the context in which they appear. In fact, the context is largely ignored, except if it's needed to make the strong point about the operative phrase. Indian Heritage is one. Religion is another. Self-fulfilment. America. All the fashionable relationship labels, leading with "commitment-phobic". Any term with "issues" in it. Anything to do with children. It doesn't matter what your story is, they'll gather in swarms to react to just the one throw-away bit.

But there's one word to rule them all, one word to find them, one word to bring them all and in the darkness bind them: Feminist.

Where's a pretty fly, then?

Coffee, tea or watermelon juice

If your greatest pleasure is to sit in a coffee shop and read, are you dull and boring? If your most important goal when you're in a new place is to find that cafe, does it make you a loser? The problem with both those questions is that the answer is probably yes.

All I can say is, once I find the cafe, a stranger's city suddenly becomes mine. And 90% of the time I prefer my own company to 90% of the rest of the world's. Give or take 10. So there.

There's no rule to choose them by – I just know when I walk in whether it's the one I want. But I know it is never, ever a Starbucks. Or rather, hasn't been so far. I have lately become a seeker of wireless internet, so Starbucks might enter the lists.

There were two in Bangkok. One, all battered wood, catatonic junkies and heavy-eyed backpackers. The other, full of stylishly chunky furniture and arty types with trust funds. My Chicago one was gleaming chrome and steel, full of people from Ally McBeal. In Izmir, it was a low table on a pavement in a crowded souk. Pasadena's Kaldi had the soul of an old English coffee house and the face of a lady who lunches in LA. The one in Ithaca was a pretentiously unpretentious "family place". Providence provided an entertaining hole in the wall, full of students being pretentiously unpretentious. Beirut contributed two as well – another students’ hang-out near a university and a trucker’s cafe halfway to Nabatieh, where the scent of fresh manakish mingled with that of lemon groves and nobody spoke English.

I never got a chance to find the ones in Boston and Cape Town, but their presence throbbed around me like the memory of caffeine in my veins.

In Mauritius, a cool, shaded sanctuary, with questionable pictures on the walls and an unquestioning acceptance of generations of foibles, was a lot like the one that started it all for me. Like most of Bangalore, my secrets too have been absorbed into the air of Koshy’s – long afternoons reading a book, when I was supposed to be in class earning a degree, long mornings writing my own instead of what I was being paid to write. Warm, theatrical evenings eating mince on toast with an excitable cast of characters. The occasional breakfast or lunch with the family. New friends. Old friends. Ex-friends. If you sat long enough in Koshy’s you would meet everyone you knew. You still do – though now they often turn out to be the baby siblings of those you thought they were.

With every wave of change that sweeps Bangalore, we hold our collective breath from afar. And then sigh with relief that Koshy’s survived. Beautiful, colonial Victoria Hotel became a mall. Premier Bookshop became an office tower. Nobody negotiates Gangarams’ eccentric shelving now that Landmark displays books like CDs, so maybe that’ll go next. To make way, perhaps, for a Starbucks.

But I’ve forfeited my right to take a lofty stance about Starbucks since I was delighted to find a Dome cafe in Singapore, and chose it for the sheer familiarity – it looked exactly like mine in Dubai, down to the posters on the walls and the etching on the mirrors. In my defence, the menu is entirely different, even between the two in the same city. It seems their only “signature offering” is the service. When you’re absorbed in your book, they don’t bother you. And if you’re writing, they treat you as a sort of sacred trust. When the fifth Harry Potter came out, I went to Dome to start it over brunch. And ended up sitting there, reading, until eight in the night. I was left severely alone, and the waiter who badly wanted to talk about the book waited all day, until I asked for the bill, to do so.

The one I’m sitting in now is not bad either, but it’s no Dome.

Hiranyagarbha

It seems there is an answer to the chicken-or-egg question after all. And it would be in the Vedas. It’s surprising that the India Shining brigade hasn’t put it into a Powerpoint presentation to be forwarded round and round the universe until the end of time.

I received my two-hundred-thousandth forward today that needed me to send it back to the person who sent it to prove that I am their friend. Well, they’ve been taken off the list – as they have presumably already gathered by the absence of a reply. If the phone don’t ring, it’s me.

Anyway, we now need a new question: Was the egg broken for the First Breakfast or did the First Breakfast happen because the egg broke? Is that what they mean by First Cause?