NSG

"Years back my second son during his college days had this poster in his place pasted to the wall which read: I HAVE BEEN BEATEN, KICKED, LIED TO, CUSSED AT, SWINDLED, TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF AND LAUGHED AT...THE ONLY REASON I HANG AROUND THIS PLACE IS TO SEE WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT."

This is a mail my friend, guide and Guru in the institution where I have been working for the last 33 years sent me the other day to announce he and his wife had completed 50 years of married life. I am reproducing it in my blog with his permission. NSG, as we lovingly call him, continues:

"When we shifted our Madras home I removed the poster and kept it with me. He is fond of sending wedding anniversary greetings to us. He selects funny cards and once the caption in the card was 'TO A COUPLE OF NUTS'. I thought I must inform you that we have accomplished a feat--we have completed 50 years of married life. Fifty years of happiness, sorrow, suffering, turmoil, peace, sacrifice, accusation and above all some sort of sweet satisfaction that 50 long years have gone by amidst the turbulant life we had. Life still goes on with all these. No regrets because what a life can be and should be was lived with the available resources, contentment and satisfaction. God has been kind to us all these years and was with us without fail, guiding us."

I know NSG from the time I was 21 years old. I had slept on the floor in his humble, furniture-free home those days. We used to sit deep into the night on the mirror-neat cement floor talking. His three sons, who were school-going kids then, are now in very good positions in different corners of the world, as happy as only the children of such parents could be. NSG's influence on my life is something even he is not fully aware of.

Just wanted to share my happiness with you.

*****

knock knock knock

knock knock knock!
a speckled moth!!
wanting to come in!!!

*****

'soppam'

"appooppa vava soppam," she said this morning over the phone from kannur far away. "grandpa, i saw you in a dream!"

what a way to start the day!

*****

beyond language

i do not know the language of the song i listened to this morning on a u-tube link on my friend MTaI's blog:

but listening to the music and watching the scenes unfolding i heard the song saying this:

when someone dies somewhere
it is part of me that dies
when a child is born somewhere
it is me... being born again....

her post is on the Mumbai bomb blasts:

http://m-t-a-i.blogspot.com/2011/07/with-deepest-sympathy.html

Stuntman

The faded picture here shows me as a stuntman in an old Malayalam movie. I polevaulted on to the 10-foot-high wall of a fortress in that film for Prem Nazir. In the picture you see me wearing Nazir's costume. I was studying third year BSc at that time. The entire class, including four of our teachers, had come to see the shooting of me jumping over the leaping fire in the moat around the fortress to reach the top. It was a crucial scene. On reaching the top of the fortress and vanquishing a demon rested Nazir's chances of winning Sheela's hand. He pulls out a flagstaff, his expression displaying his determination and lunges forward. From that moment the shot is from behind and I take over the action. I did the jump clean first chance. Looking back I see how risky it was. There would never have been a second chance. The entire shooting crew applauded when I landed on top of the fortress. My classmates too applauded. Among them was a girl whom I had loved from the time we were in school. I remember seeing her eyes sparkle when stunt director Thyagarajan hugged me for the perfect jump. "My hero!" her eyes said...

I found this picture the other day when I was searching for my certificates among my old papers. The writing at the bottom-left corner of the frame says the picture was taken on February 5, 1977. Jijo Punnoose (son of Navodaya Appachan and director of 'My Dear Kuttichathan') took the picture. It is his handwriting. He was one of my classmates. There were four of us always moving as an inseparable team while in college. He was one of them. Another team member Anil Surana is now a prosperous businessman in Bangalore. Anil, after leaving college, acted in a couple of Jijo's films. The fourth was Raju, whose daughter Navya Nair is a very fine film artiste--in fact, the leading heroine of Malayalam movies until two years ago when she stopped acting following her marriage.

The girl with the sparkling eyes about whom I spoke is now a grandma. In the class the day after the shooting, Jijo gave this photo to her. You may notice that the photo is slightly torn at the bottom left corner. I had tried to snatch it from her hands, causing the damage. She had preserved the picture all these years along with our certificates and some other miscellaneous papers, including certain very embarassing poems I had written to her those days.

*****

flux

i am floating free on the crest of a gigantic flux--
i am a wave-riding water skater.
free and weightless i glide,
twisting and turning and rising and falling i glide,
on the crest and trough and crest of this flux,
gigantic flux,
the free flowing one that started with my birth,
much before,
much much before,
the one that started much before my father's birth,
even before the birth of intelligence on earth,
before even the birth of the concept and the word...

thus i float
on the crest of this gigantic flux...
remembering,
suddenly,
from where it all started--
knowing,
suddenly,
where the flux is taking me.

*****

across my porch

a formless remorse floods in...

i unwind each count
all the way down to one
and find
an unending procession of ants
across my porch
on some timeless mission
this morning.

*****