26 Jun 2025 / Mind & Memoir

The smaller Bigger Picture

Nothing on one plane, something on another. Perspective is route to gleaned wisdom. All very heavily personalized and individuated; some fragmented value. Especially if it offers unalloyed banal, mundane truth. And truth, we know, has receded so far back-stage that it feeds only ghosts. As I linger in this world, my always uncomfortable equations become worse. I cannot lay claim to anything of value --- no significant achievement on any plane, no accoutrement of conventional relationships, no leverage with established wares which are life’s barters. I have no family except the animals and plants I consider kin. No friends, no network, no relatives. I prefer it this way. I like the solitude and freedom from suffering people – save some exceptions, sometimes. I have no compass or credo except that I lived my truth as best as I could. I am, therefore, at a curious juncture where I spend disproportionate time, oftentimes unwittingly, in my inner world. You see, in my late middle-age, I am weary of the world. Tired of the business of living and too jaded. But there were gentler times. Those remain locked up inside my head. When they emerge, I am transported to the days that were ---- down to the ambience and the atmosphere. It is the ambience and the atmosphere which can never be described. These are too many, too layered, too contextual and too personalized. The fact that people of a certain time and a certain milieu alone can attempt to relate to them. And even then, Rashomon Gate gets to work ---- our takes on everything, singular incidents even, are different, too personalized and locked up in our own island universes. And then there’s the theory of a continuous present without predicates of past or future. Within this hash, like taste or smell, things must be lived at that particular time; only at that particular time. That’s impossible across seas of indifferent years. I must confess that like much else in my time and experience, the anecdotes I recall and present here could be nothing more than a farrago of nonsense. But they are there. I should like to think these might offer slivers which echo somewhere, even if they only state obvious banality. Between deeply cemented poles of time and space, memory has rigged a swing. The mind swings and views alternates between near-far…As I prise long-gone years, the deity of dice rolls them out and brings disjointed incidents. Dice are polyhedral always. They are loaded with dungeons and dragons just as much as with sunshine and flowers. The deity brings them forth, places them in front of me. I must see and I must tell. Sometimes, I am able to pick a lesson {which I now understand after such a long time on the runway of life} and oftentimes I just look wistfully, with anxiety, with fear, with regret, with happiness….I always look and then actually see a few of these bits of dice which jump out at me. These are habit-forming, these patterns of the past.

In 1971 I was five years old. We had shifted to a new house in a government colony of mid-ranking bureaucrats. An old lady would come by once-in-a-while seeking food / five paise. Now, for a five year old, everyone above ten is old. I remember her sunken cheeks, that gnarled body mauled by time, her toothless grin and the satiation as she ate the roti and vegetables accompanied by dal my mother would give her…she would smile, thank the almighty for the meal and the coin before slowly walking away, leaning on her walking stick. And yes, not free meals, she would insist on singing a bhajan. I see her fortitude, her dignity, her gratitude. And the fact that there’s an essential loneliness of the soul. One cannot escape it. Be distracted, yes. Escape, never. In this place where I loved, houses were laid out in near rectangles, a ground and a first floor series of flats. Separating them were a walk-way, hedges, a vast lawn, trees and private garden patches. Open spaces, minimal traffic outside the block and loads of quietude. An old man, must have been in his late sixties or early seventies, would come each month. He had been a clerk during the Raj, and had retired mid-century. Economics had forced him to travel far and wide across residential colonies of this capital city, carting two huge heavy sacks of munchies. He would very politely go door-to-door requesting people to buy the wares. And people were people – you know what I mean. He would be unfazed. My parents were nicer and would buy stuff. He never lamented his situation and even though visibly exhausted, would politely decline a refreshment or a sit-down. On the only occasion I saw him eat, it was a single piece of roti with vegetables stuffed inside. Of this, I spied him offering a portion to birds……He faded away as quietly as he had faded in…stopped coming. No one noticed. He came to mind today as I was ruing aspects of my situation. I saw him again and he, this unknown old man, reminded me across those distant, vanished times of grit, of quiet dignity, of playing along the pantomime of situation and circumstance, playing along as long as the play went on…a lesson of fortitude and stoicism.

Talking of birds, there was a neighbor, an oldish Sikh. Upon returning from work, he would bathe, change into home attire, and sit in a worn lounge chair feeding sparrows. And what a sight it was…dozens of sparrows knew him. They’d flutter to him at the precise time towards dusk, twittering and playing and gobbling up the wheat-flour he would gently pluck and offer his winged friends…..and there were these village women. Two or three of them. They sat under a tree draped in well-worn, frayed cotton saris. Faces marked more by hardship and sparse lives than by time. They winnowed grain. The tree had sparrows who were all over these two women and all across the old durree on which they sat. They winnowed all day, the sparrows twittered all day, I watched many times. Neither they nor the sparrows took any notice of me. The scene is alive once again. No one winnows wheat like that now. Not in the manual manner they used to…….Friendship with non-humans and peace in simplicity.

The exceedingly good-looking and well-mannered Mr. Kohli was my friend for a year in 1982. I was in the 10th standard and our friendship hinged on the common-different fact that he was as petrified of math as I, in his 10th standard ---- 1943. Like him, I passed by the skin-of-my-teeth. Like him I loved literature and poetry. We both were intrigued by philosophy and metaphysics. We both saw Will Durant and Arnold Toynbee as humanists more than historians. The gentleman was a francophone. {I joined French classes at the Alliance de Francaise later, hoping to strike gold with a pretty girl I fancied ---- that’s another story} Mr. Kohli had a very genteel family. Two grown-up sons who would visit him and a very genteel wife. Mrs. Kohli, I remember kept house very well and was an expert at ikebana. Mr. Kohli retired, the estate office {government accommodation, remember} reminded him several times to surrender the house. The literary man that he was Mr. Kohli kept stalling. One day as I was at school, the chaps from enforcement came and threw out everything. When I returned, the house was padlocked and sealed. Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat was lying on the walk-way amidst debris and of detritus canna flowers…The world is hard, cold, cruel. Mr. Kohli was past tense.

And Mr. Kakkar. He resembled Mountbatten to degree. Well over six feet, roses and cream complexion and very polite manners…I remember him helping my mother search for a lost key in the lawn, finding it and being very civil about everything. He had a daughter who I had a crush on {I was afflicted early}. She was married off to an indifferent chap and the lovely girl, full of bubbles and charm wilted. Not a patch unto her earlier self when I saw her later…Mr. Kakkar developed dementia, would wander off or stand gazing at the skies in rapt attention…he passed off gently…wandered off one day. It was Mr. Kakkar who led me to appreciate English confectionary and the art of casual elegance. One did not have to be rich in order to be well-dressed. One had to cultivate good taste in totality…Nothing lasts. Not looks, nor position or persona, not even the mind and a sense of self…And Sengupta uncle. Bhadralok Bengali from Mymensingh in what is now Bangladesh. He had glasses like Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was my father’s friend and a bachelor. From Sengupto uncle, I learnt about Bangla sweets ---- the best, Kantha art, the intricacies of Rabindra Sangeet, Bengali literature and a smattering of Tantra – interest in it. Mr. Sengupta, like my father, was a bibliophile and like a true Bengali, loved to debate. He schooled me in rhetoric. His parents had been killed during Partition and as the elder brother of six sisters, he had raised them and settled them. I fancied his bachelor lifestyle which he taught me, was free of trammels of women and household. He lived in an empire of the mind. Died of cardiac arrest. There are gems to be collected from anywhere I learnt from him. I bathe three times a day during the harsh Indian summer and twice a day in winter. Without this I cannot eat or sleep. Not quite OCD, but I am terribly orderly. So orderly that now except the fact that an object is neatly and systematically kept in its appropriate place, I sometimes forget where on earth it is. Mr. Gupta, a paying guest, originally from Agra, was always squeaky clean, fresh and neat. Smelt reassuringly of Lifebuoy soap. He taught me the fingernail rule and within that, the rule of thirds. He also taught me the detailed way of washing hands….the fastidiously clean, very composed, affable Mr. Gupta.

A rather fragile and tattered book: Glimpses of Greatness. Decades later I purchased a new version, but the tattered book lies in my bed-side table’s drawer. Vector to memory and Shri Sitaram Sharma. Slight, sparse man, he moved into the neighbourhood with his wife, two daughters abandoned by their husbands, a third daughter who was bright, but had compromised a hand to polio. And a son. The Sharma family were from Rajasthan and rather bland. Awkward, even. A quintessential traditional, purist brahmin, Shri Sharma never ate or drank anything – not even water – outside his house. Never travelled by public transport and never talked much, preferring to restrict his time to silent prayer and contemplation; his energy to a walk down to central secretariat, around which this government colony gravitated. He’d carry sprouted gram or pulses and a copper bottle of water long before these bottles hit mainstream. He’d return, bathe, say his prayers and attempt to teach me Sanskrit….Pandit ji told me spiritual stories and then the book you do not see here. He also taught me simplicity and how to approximate rather accurately, the hour of the day by the fall of sunlight.

There’s nothing to these most blasé, most common, inconsequential, long-gone people. But the past is prologue. To me it is, as I choose, course-correct and settle to a more ruminative, reflective lifestyle. As I search for predicates to my life and what remains of it, I see these actors – howsoever incidental, fleeting and far removed they may be – as teachers. Unconventional, unorthodox ones who never meant to teach, but taught an anonymous boy some abiding lessons on the ride of time. Time then, was materially poorer but otherwise far richer. In terms of people’s depth, poise, simplicity --- enforced by socialism and dearth perhaps, but they made peace with it. That very measured spend of money ---- and a lived truth that money is largely incidental, beyond a point not essential. That baubles and toys for grown-ups are not the same as curated and cultivated pursuits. There was nothing special about these people as I see and recollect them and they were certainly not any sort of angels. I summon memory only in passing. I extract the juice and run…I am fortunate, I suppose. I grew up in better times and amongst almost-strangers who had something to teach, to impart and I, something to learn. The unspeakable present has vicious dwarfs in endless competition. They have nothing to offer except caprice and strife. When the great library of Alexandria was burnt by Julius Ceaser, then early Christians, then the Muslims, when it crumbled finally, the head priest cursed the world: henceforth fools would beget greater fools. A progressively inverse equation, destined to crumble upon itself…As I walk these alleys of the mind, there’s two of me, and then several. Shadows are a trace, you see, and they shift shape. Towards the evening of my life, they are only getting longer…my existence peripatetic in increasing degrees…I know I offer dull, drab and fairly useless vignettes of a mediocre life. But then, an oil slick in a puddle can show you rainbows. Sometimes.