BIRTHDAY NO. 46 & Buzzing Off

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