i dreamt of my father and mother today. he was looking handsome. she had that calm air about her which had always been hers, as though she had made it herself. with every gaze of her sharp brown eyes, every raising and lowering of her eyelids, the slow purposeful turn of her head, the stillness she held in every line and curve. she could turn the calm into what she willed in an instant. it always impacted you with such…
it’s not possible to think of history while thinking of chops. especially mutton chops. and yet, i tried. one may not think that’s an achievement… and this would only be because one hadn’t had a mutton chop, the way bengalis make it. chop, to a bengali, is not a cut of meat. it’s a beatific smile inducing joyful experience that involves getting lost in another world while recalling exactly how mother or grandmother or boro ma or younger kakima, or…
Apparently, guests are the equivalent of Gods. And the one thing I have learnt over the years is that these categories of gods pay special attention to food and drink. You have dreamt of this perfect summer with you as the perfect host. One that is going to make the Gods happy. You wake up as early as possible; high chances are that an old aunt woke up earlier. So you rush to make her morning tea. By which time…
she wasn’t very tall, had a slight figure, hair in a bun, a pleasant expression, nothing remarkable really, yet the two of us were staring at her riveted. next thing i remember, we’d waylaid her and started an animated conversation. i looked at the photograph recalling things. it was the winter of 1980, i think. no internet, no google, no photoshop; i have to rely on good old memory. nice feeling. in fact, when i found the photograph, and grinned…
i don’t know what exactly is art, but if it’s something that makes you stop, stare, feel a strange attraction and look at a thing differently, then this was definitely art. it made me want to go close, touch the thing. on lavender street that day, the sun blazing, traffic going by at its usual weekday pace, i couldn’t look away from that burst of colours and intriguing shapes. what was it? what was it doing here? shouldn’t it be…
Some would call Sid a spoilt rich kid. He was not mean or hard-hearted. He had just not given too many things a serious thought. He was the cool kid. Hanging around with his friends. Aimless about his future. Having fun in the ease of the present. There was no time for a worrying mother. His mother didn’t know English. She didn’t give up trying to speak in the few broken phrases she did know. School was ‘isschool’. She liked…
Delicate tufts of baby pink and pearly white like fresh flakes of snow. Cherry blossoms in bloom herald the start of spring. I like to think of spring season as the time nature allows itself to heal, or atleast the parts that are in its control. Leaves that had withered away in fall, take a shaky first breath as they dare to spring to life all over again. Flowers that could not bear the harsh winter, tentatively start to face…
“bzzzzzzzzzz!” it was the carpenter bee. black and rotund and a little hazy as it whirred about and dashed against the blooms of the bright yellow trumpet flower. “oh, up early today i see!” exclaimed the lavender mauvely, it was the nearest to the blues it could get. “let it be… let it be…! let it beeeee…” replied the carpenter bee, he had a thing for punning. no one ever said a bee couldn’t, after all. lavender rolled its spikes,…
had we not been trying our best to avoid the cemetery, we’d never have found it. the rain had been heavy, it was never quite gone the entire day. aj and i set out to walk around seven in the evening, light was falling fast. the traffic was thick and noisy along queensway, the first left from my place. to avoid it, we crossed the road, walked a little along commonwealth avenue, then took an unfamiliar path going in the…
the idols were lined up on the narrow ledge under the tall windows in the corner room. the ledge was designed to be a book shelf but no one remembered seeing a book on it ever; instead, dust and cobwebs gathered and had a good time on the yellow ochre lime wash, enjoying the slanting sun rays that fell through the shutters. but today, there was not a speck of dust anywhere. nor cobwebs. only eight beautiful idols. eight pairs…