Mea culpa! Mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa! I missed my Saturday deadline for two weeks in a row. Unforgivable and for those who complained about being denied their weekly fix ,here's a bonus - some poetry (expanding on the theme set in my last blog ; written 13 years ago) and some prose (dedicated to Busybee , the late columnist, and my friends). Back to school when we English Lit was referred to Poetry and prose. Do they still do that? I wonder?
BIRTHDAY
NO. 46
On my forty-sixth
birthday
I stepped down from
the train.
A morbid crowd had
gathered
to watch with rabid
curiosity.
We willed the train
to move away
to expose the
gruesome view to our sight.
He lay there on the
tracks.
His head was a metre
astray!
What were his last
thoughts?
Did he dream of
home and hearth?
Of warm welcomes,
of tearful goodbyes,
Of insignificant
battles won and enduring love lost!
On his wrist, Time
carried on its restless march
Regardless of
Life’s frightening farce.
His briefcase
revealed the remains of his day
Now the debris of a
life as on the ground he lay!
Lunch pail,
calculator, notepad,
pens, pencils and
eraser,
flat file
restraining paper in the damp,
fetid air of
unfinished business!
On the forty-sixth
anniversary of my birth,
I encountered
death!
(End of Part 1)
Buzzing Off
(Tribute to Busybee)
It was nearing bedtime and I was settling down with my favourite book of
Busybee essays. The First Lady cast “that” look in my direction and queried,
“Why do you waste time reading that man’s essays?”
“He is not “that man”, he is Busybee and he is one of my idols!” I
replied.
“You have the habit of idolizing the wrong people. How will you become a
writer if you pattern yourself along people who write the wrong type of
essays!” she shot back.
“He writes topical essays that are relevant to our times. If you read an
essay he wrote in 1987, it has the same relevance in 2004!”
“That is because our politicians have not changed. They are the same
boring predictable people!”
“That may be true but he writes about other things as well.”
“What other things? You like him because he writes about the Matharpacady
speakeasies that you frequented during the Prohibition era! About police raids
and running helter-skelter through dark lanes! About Flora Fountain when it was
called Flora Fountain and not Hutatma Chowk! About Bombay Hockey! And all those
Irani restaurants that you used to hang out in your college days!”
“Of course! He enjoyed the good things in life as I do! And there were
not that many police raids! Besides, in my college days there were no McDonalds
or Pizza Huts. Even if there were McDonalds and Pizza Huts, I would not have
been able to afford them. That is why I like Irani restaurants with their bun
maska and chai! These children nowadays will not eat anything unless there is a
brand name to it. I am fine with bun maska and chai which tasted as good in
Kyani or Bastani or Light of Asia or Alice Restaurant or Roshan Stores or
Gentleman Restaurant!”
“This is not about children and what they like; this is about the books
you should read. What about all those books – fancy authors like Kafka and
Faulkner and Salman Rushdie you have purchased from all those sales at Strand
Book Stall and Oxford and Crossword. Are they just going to adorn bookshelves
in our house so that people can come over and say, “My, your husband is so well
read!”
“I do not care what people say and if I wanted to buy books to adorn the
shelves I would have bought those coffee table editions that rich people strew
around their homes!’
“We would have been rich if you did not spend so much money on books!”
“Books are wealth. But you will not understand that because they do not
translate into money like stocks and bonds. Besides, I just finished reading
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude! In which he repeats
those long South American names every time he refers to his characters! You
know that they have names like Goan names! Lengthy sentences for names like my
uncle, Tiburcio Joaquim Adauco Sebastian Miguel Rodrigues from Raia, Arlem,
Goa! You see how easy it is to fill pages if you repeat names like that!”
“Isn’t that the fellow who won the Nobel Prize? You should aspire to be
like him not like that Busybee fellow!”
“Yes, yes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize (not my uncle,
Tiburcio Joaquim Adauco Sebastian Miguel Rodrigues from Raia, Arlem, Goa) and
you know what he said. He said that he does not write for the man in the street
or the elite but for his small circle of friends! Of course he had friends who
settled for nothing less than four hundred pages in one book!”
“That is what I said. You should aspire to be like that and begin by
writing for your small circle of friends!”
“That is exactly what I am saying. I have one thing in common with
Busybee; I am never going to win the Nobel Prize. And another thing I have in
common with him. All my friends have extremely short attention spans!”
Antonio
