The Grandpa Tree

Winter mornings in Bangalore are quite cold. Not cold as in ice-cream freezer cold. But cold enough to make you wish for an extra layer of clothing inspite of wearing a halfsleeve woollen sweater over the white and blue school uniform. At least makes you hope you had a full sleeve sweater instead. But knowing fully well that I looked better in the one I was wearing currently, I would scrunch up my face and brave the chill with a big wide smile. Better to suffer a few hours of feeling a little colder if it avoids having to wear a drab blue monstrosity of a sack with two sleeves.

    But then huddled together with fellow travellers on the road to Christ School, in a bus filled to the brim in white shirts, navy blue ties, navy blue trousers, navy blue sweaters and black shoes with matching navy blue socks is quite warm. Not black socks mind you. Black or white or any other colour (Pink!! God forbid) earns you a telling off from the PT master. So in a bus filled with all assortments of blue and white clothes and people wearing them, I would sit bundled into a seat for two seating five. Around me, as the puttani* girls played some game where they sang some song and flapped their arms about a lot and the peekiri* guys played hand cricket and rolled around in the seat when one of them lost, the older kids learnt poems byheart, filled out handwriting books, read for a class test, or like me, lazy bum that I am, stared out the window.

    I was not ogling at girls. Let me make that clear. Like I said its too cold for anyone to be about unless they are all bundled up. And anyway, I was just a kid of 13 years. Poor innocent me. I was just drinking in the sight of Bangalore waking up. One of the things that I would wait for though, was the sight of the Silk Board flyover bathed in mist. Bangalore does not have fog. It has mist, thick and heavy in winter. Its like the whole world has been painted white with shadows appearing out of nowhere right next to you. The sight of the flyover bathed in mist on a morning like that is quite beautiful.

    To the left is the Central Silk Board with several silver oaks peeping through the mist. To the right though is a tree that has fascinated me since I saw it for the first time. The grandpa tree. There are a lot of trees in the vicinity of the flyover, especially in that big plot in the corner where Sarjapur Road meets Hosur Road. No it’s not on the side which has the huge open drain. Its on the other side. In the days when we used to go to school, that plot had a pond in it and in an outcropping into the pond was this big old dying tree. On eerie winter mornings, it looked like a thin emaciated hand clutching at the veils shrouding it, a dark spectral shadow we saw through the mist. It presented a different story though when we came back home all sweaty and tired after a day at school. A tree with bare, dark and gnarled branches spread out and a bit of foliage at the top. Looking like a comical old umbrella that has seen too many storms; tattered and torn with bits of cloth hanging to the stained frame.

    On clear sunny mornings, the sky over the flyover would be dotted with large numbers of birds, Black kites and eagles gliding along high in the sky or diving down on each other while crows wheeled about cawing their displeasure about the presence of these predators so close to their nests. It was not an uncommon sight to see these majestic birds being chased away by a couple of very agitated crows. The grandpa tree on the pond was one sight I looked forward to seeing on such days because Brahminy Kites usually roost on these trees and It was such a beautiful sight to see them. Brown with a white head and breast, they sat serenely upon the dark boughs of the tree; some preening themselves slowly or others just sitting. I always thought they were enjoying the fresh morning air while it lasted before going out to begin the day’s laborious flight.

Seeing these ‘White Headed Eagles’ as I called them at the time usually made my mornings all the more brighter. I had this theory that if I didn’t get to see them in the morning, then something bad would happen in school. And it inevitably would. I also thought that the more of them I saw, the better the day would be. So when the bus began the slow climb up the flyover, I would football tackle anyone who stood between me and a clear look out the window and when I saw atleast five of them, I knew that the day would be perfect. Of course, it never worked out that way, but seeing them in the morning made me feel so good, that I was ready to take on anything and even if I did forget the Kannada homework that day, it didn’t make me feel all that bad.

    I resolved then that once I became a big man and had lots of money, I would buy that plot from whomsoever it belonged to and ensure that that pond and the tree remained like that without being marred by the next multi-storeyed corporate monstrosity. During my years in Christ Junior College, I could not take the liberty of football tackling random people on the BMTC bus, so I became content with the brief glimpses I got when I managed to get a window seat. Moreover, I was in college now, studying science and going to become a doctor or an engineer, I knew kites could never influence how my day went. But still it was with growing sadness I saw the pond getting choked by weeds. After a year came the lorries with their loads of mud. The pond was covered up with soil and fearing the worst I started forcing myself to stop turning around to look at the tree. By then the only sign of life on the tree were the kites roosting on it. So gradually, like the rest of my school days it got stacked into a shelf in my mind, dusted off and taken out once in a while when I felt like going back to school again.

    Last week, sitting on a near empty Volvo bus on my way to watch Transformers 3, I was as usual staring out the window. I noticed the plot again. It was almost the same. No corporate monstrosity had come up and the red mud that had buried the pond now sprouted a couple of year’s worth of undergrowth. The trees were still there and were all green and fresh after two days of rain. The grandpa tree though was no longer there. I don’t know what happened to it. It was just not there. There was a space there, a patch of blue sky speckled with rainy grey. When I came that way again the next morning, I looked again, just to make sure. The new patch of sky was still there. The eagles and kites were still gliding around the open drainand there was a lot more cawing than I remembered. The Brahminy were also still there roosting on the silver oaks at CSB. My tree wasn't.

*peekiri - tiny in malayalam

*puttani - tiny in kannada
And yes, I love the word monstrosity

(It turns out it was not just me who told fortunes basing on the Brahminy Kite. Google tells me that this kite is the Bird-God of War for the Iban of Malaysia. The Brahminy Kite's presence is an omen to guide them in major decisions such as warfare and house building. For those who want to know more.) 

Tatterdemalion

  I shall be very frank. I wanted to write this post because then, in my list of posts, this post would appear as  'Tatteredemalion by Tatteredemalion.' I like the sound of that. Oh don't worry, I'm not a pretentious, self obsessed wierdo. Well no one has said anything to that effect to me at least. This is not an autobiography. I don't think I'll qualify as autobiographical material. I haven't come on TV. My story is not a particularly inspiring one. Unless this blog inspires someone to invent a virus that hacks into nonsensical blogs and hits delete. Nor do I  have any scandalous insights into the lives of someone famous that I can use to sell my life story. Well, not yet anyway.

This post is about a series of books wrtten by Chris Wooding and titled Broken Sky. The story focuses on twins, Kia and Ryushi, whose idyllic life is shattered when their village is destroyed by the forces of their king. Then it has follows the usual hero and heroine joining the rebels to destroy the evil king. But the twist here is that the king, Macaan rules two worlds and not just their own. And of course, since its fantasy and has to involve special powers, the people in their world have access to spirit stones, which when augmented into a persons body, gives him or her the power to manipulate nature, heal sicknesses, or augment skills - depending on the colour of the stones.

The two worlds, Kirin Taq and the Dominions have only one link bonding them - the Resonants. They are people with the ability to shift across the boundary between the worlds. The name 'Broken Sky' comes from the myth which says that both worlds were once one before the sky was split and they became two. Macaan maintains his iron fisted rule with the help of his army and his secret police, the Jachyra. They are former Resonants who have been forcibly augmented with technology, distorting their power. Though they are now extremely fast and agile killing macines, they cannot travel between worlds anymore; but now have the abilty to travel between mirrors. Yeah, i know, pretty stupid, but its kind of cool too. This allows them to effectively spy for Macaan from any reflective surface.

Tatteredemalion is the head of the Jachyra. His identity before the change is never revealed in the books. What we do know is that the Jachyra hate Macaan for what he did to them, stripping away their humanity and turning them into machines. But to ensure their loyalty and of every other subordinate in his employ, Macaan has implanted a certain type of spirit stone in each of them, that is attuned to a trigger stone set in his forehead. This enables him to kill any one of them or everyone of them with a single thought. Inspite of this, Tatteredemalion joins forces with the rebels in the end, even faking his own death to fool Macaan.

He convinces his fellow Jachyra to join him and aids the rebels in the final battle, only to die. No blaze of glory, no valiant last stand, no fighting off a hundred foes, no taking a bullet for love and honour. One minute he was alive and the other minute dead and noone even notices his death because its so sudden and quiet. One of the bravest people in the entire series and he dies for nothing except a token display of defiance.

I read this series in classes four, five and six. I really enjoyed it, desperately searching through the endless multicolured tomes in the school library trying to find the next book. Small books, the size of your typical Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, with a lot more to it than many of the modern fantasy, thriller series. My favourite charecter, by the end was Tatteredmallion. Even after he died and the world was saved, I just could not get him out of my mind. He was one of the bad guys till the very end, but I felt he deserved much more. From what is quite obvious in the book, from the way Macaan is killed in the end, it was a hair's breadth of a win for a good guys. The Jachyra being with them didn't help them very much. But their absence from his side definitely hurt Macaan.

And if they had been with him, and he had won, obviously there would have been no fulfilling end to the story and this post would never have happened, but they would have remained as some of the most powerful and feared entities in their worlds. But instead, they renounced it all and turned against their master for nothing to look forward to except death. Nothing else awaited them. How do you take such a decision? How can you give up everything you have for a cause when you know that when you start fighting, all that will happen is that you will keel over and die. And even if by some Jupiter sized quirk of fate they did live through it, what is it they had to look forward to. Reviled and hated by the people, they were the beasts and monsters that haunted tales told by mothers to scare children into obeying them. Less than human and no more than animated machines, they would have been shunned and stoned by the very people who they helped. Is it worth dying for this. To be abandoned on the field of battle, lying in the corner of a room, forgotten by all except a one character - a traitor and a scoundrel - who says "I kinda liked that Tatteredemalion guy."

Tatteredemalion did that. And he was one of my biggest childhood heroes. Everytime I come to a situation where I have to either do something very tough or take the easy way out, I think of Tatteredemalion. I dont always do the right thing. Atleast, when I think of it, I am shamed into accepting that a lesser than human mechanical assasin turned out to be better at this than me. Someday, maybe I will get the courage to become idealistic again. Someday, maybe I can go back to adoring Tatteredemalion and believing I can take decisions like that too. Someday, maybe I can stop stop hiding behind his name and actually do something like he did because I believed in something.

But not today. Today I tell myself I'm a fool to try and emulate a figment of someone's imagination. I tell myself that I'm not acting my age, that I need to grow up and start thinking like the 20 year old I am. Today I tell myself the real world has no place for idealism; that it too lies dead and forgotten in the corner of a room. Today I shall go to bed thinking why I cant go back to being 11 years old.

(Btw a tatterdemalion is a child  or a tramp wearing tattered or ragged clothing. Kind of fitting as all the Jachyra wear rags. And if you are curious, he's the little blue guy with the red eye on the cover of book #2 in the picture above)

Egg and Cheese Sandwich

I have read several blogs where the blogger goes "Its been a long time since I posted...". I've always wondered why. But the answer came to me today in a blaze of self realization. Its been a long time since I posted. Three drafts. Each with a couple of lines. This has been the state of my blog since December of last year.In my defense, I could say that I was part of three plays this year and all of my creative juices were spent on those productions. Or I could just accept the fact that I was plain lazy.

So I opened my blog the other day and checked on the drafts that have been waiting for me for several months. All of them are quite interesting. Brimming with a potential that rivalled all of my other posts. The first brush strokes of a collection of masterpieces. And so I chucked them and sat staring at a fresh page and listening to Unwritten by Natasha Beddingfield.

And I sat and sat. I wanted something special. Something that captured who I really was. Dealing with my identity and conflict. I wanted slices of human life and I wanted to represent them in ways that brought out the different shades in human beings. I discarded the IPL finals where Bangalore put up a miserable effort. I chucked the Lokpal movement because I wanted the identity thingy to be there. I put the fact that i had learnt to make burnt egg and Amul cheese sandwiches in the garbage bin. But reserved a spot for it when I learnt to make chicken biriyani. I stoppered my rising outrage at the fact that PVR charges Rs 90 for tickets in the morning whle its 240 bucks in the night and decided it definitely was not a good topic. Makes me think Chennai is a better city after all with CSK and Sathyam Theatres. Then I struck upon the idea of writing about Chennai and how beautiful it is. But then i decided against it considering the anti-Chennai feel among my friends after the defeat on Saturday. I mean, I'd rather get beaten up because of something more fulfilling than a blog post. An anti-government protest march for my rights or a mass movement against environmental degradation or maybe a mass burning of Twilight books. Yeah blog post on Chennai out.

And so I decided to post about the most excited thing that happened in Bangalore after I came home this month. The election results were very very exciting and was in tough contention with the fact that I had a blast at my cousins wedding. But then the whole hullabolla about the guv's decision to impose pesidents rule made me ponder whether to write about Center - State relations in India, especially after the Indian Constitution course last sem. But then suddenly I remembered that Osama was dead. Of course that was not in Bangalore. But heck its a global village and I am definitely thrilled about the never before seen super stealthy, super secret super helo that the commandos used to sneak in and out of Pakistan. Made me believe in Bollywood movies agian. Wonder whether he  laughed at the US soldiers who trained Pak soldiers outside his house. But then again, I can't claim it changed or challenged my idea of my identity. Just made me question the identity of the people living next door.

And then realisation struck me a second time. Edison's bulb flickered alive after a long period of 5 months with 'An Idea'. I should change it to a Havells bulb. Have you seen the ad where all the bulbs turn on together at the preset time. Really cool. Maybe the one above my head will keep turning on every day at 6 or something.

See three paragraphs into this post, my sister came in and applied Iodex on my shoulder and thats when the idea struck me. What happened to my shoulder? Thats what my post is about silly!

Three weeks into coming home, I had an intense urge to eat egg and cheese sandwich. A quick look around the kitchen revealed the disappointing news that there was no cheese or bread at home. And so I trotted down to the supemarket down the road to buy cheese, sandwich bread and pack of mango flavured Amul icecream (for the heck of it). Its not exactly a Reliance Fresh kind of super market. Just an extra big provision store with a couple of ailes with stuff stuffed into the shelves. No lines and long billing queues. The guy who helped you find where the papad was will bill the entire thing while chatting with you about the weather and what you had for lunch and take the cash and bid you a nice goodbye.

And so I was walking down the main road thinking that the retail scene in India has not entirely gone to the cold freezers of Reliance Fresh and Namdharis when something bowled into me from behind. Well not into me exactly. and no one bowled a motorbike at me. The front wheel of a blue coloured bike crashed into my right leg and spun me around in the air for about 3 seconds (plus or minus a couple of seconds) and sent me crashing to the ground and the next thing I know I'm lying on the ground looking up at the sky. I dont remember whether the sky was light blue or dark blue, or whether the clouds were wispy or looked like the dome of the Sistine chapel. The next to next thing I know, I'm picking up my shopping and dusting off my leg which scraped against the wheel of the bike while the three (THREE!!) guys on the bike kept shouting at me about walking in the middle of the road. I was walking on the side. I swear. That was adding insult to injury wasn't it, so i shouted back in garbled Kannada while he tried to salvage what he could of his rear view mirror. And then random strangers began joining the conversation. Since I was the victime here, they asked me if i was alright and to my great satisfaction berated the motorists. I said I was okay and that my house was right around the corner, picked up the groceries and went home. I washed off the scrapes with Dettol and ate the egg and cheese sandwich that my mom made while watching Karate Kid on Pix. Bill Smith's kid sure can act!

Oh and read the Dresden Files. Makes for better reading than this. Guess its too late now though.

Theory of Relativity

The hands of his watch told him it was a few minutes past two. Isn’t she done with class yet? He looks out the window expectantly. No one. He turned back to his Physics teacher. “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity states....” He liked physics, a lot. But now, he could not concentrate. He was waiting for her. Every Tuesday and Friday during the second slot after lunch, she walked past his classroom on the way to the labs. Her half laugh, her eyes, her hair. That moment defined his entire day. 

Slowly the first of them trooped past, talking and laughing. Uniforms and faces filed past the window. She wasn’t there. He threw caution to the winds and turned around to look. Her friends walked past. She was nowhere to be seen. Did I miss her? He bit the end of his pen as he watched the stragglers hurry to catch up. He looked back at the teacher disappointed.

“...When you sit on a hot stove for two seconds, it feels like an hour. When you sit with a beautiful woman for an hour, it seems like two seconds...” Everyone laughed. He tugged at his tie and added one more doodle to his page. Suddenly his partner nudged him - a blur of white outside the window! He turned around again. False alarm, just the peon. Suddenly something hit him on his head. The duster. The class laughed again, now at him. “Hari, I’m standing here. Not outside the window. Pay attention in class.” 

 He ducked under the table to pick up the duster, dodging sly comments. He came back up to see her standing outside the window, looking at him, giggling. Their eyes met. She smiled and slowly glided away. He looked down at the duster, a smile playing on his lips. Einstein was wrong. That felt like eternity.