Spike

Checked my blog stats by chance on a day when there was an inexplicable spike in the number of visitors. Like, over a 1,000, which never happens. It's not like I've posted much, let alone anything controversial or even topical.

The evergreens are those poems and choruses that everyone comes for: Edwin Morgan, Anouilh's Antigone, Marachera, a couple more things. More recently, it becomes evident that board exams are round the corner and people are looking for things on schools. So Shantamma, that post about conversations about schools and Rishi Valley keep getting read.

But otherwise? *shrug* Who knows why anyone still reads this blog? (This is not ingratitude. I'm glad the three or four of you who still check in are around).

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'Spike' also reminds me of reading at the University of Hyderabad with Kazim Ali. I read my ghazal, in the last line of which is the word 'spike'. Kazim, following a train of thought set off my poem, suddenly decided to read a new one he'd written, and which he had to read off his laptop. It had something to do with the word 'spike' but the only thing I remember about it is that was preceded by a story about a sect of mystical men who swear to wear trousers with drop-crotches, to catch any babies they might have.

Yes. I am not dreaming this up. I was not on anything.

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That ghazal I wrote, it was one of the poems I sent in for a couple of German poets to translate. This is the Poets Translating Poets project that the Max Mueller Bhavan has been doing all of 2015. Hyderabad was the penultimate stop, and in January, Jeet Thayil, Jameela Nishat, A. Jayaprabha and I translated poems by German poets Sylvia Geist and Tom Schulz. We each had to translate a minimum of four poems and submit four for the Germans to translate.

I thought it would be fun to give them a ghazal. Sylvia took it on. She said she avoids rhymes and form in her own poetry because it comes too easily *envy* but was thrilled to work on it in translation.

I don't have enough - or indeed, any - German to judge the results. They'll be up on a website eventually, and you lot can do the needful. Instead of talking rhyme words and form, I remember googling images for that office object newspapers and restaurants use, to spike bills and memos and things. 

For some reason, it was particularly important to have the right image in one's head before attempting a translation.

The whole exercise was fun, exhausting, but I'm still wondering if it was useful. As a first pass at something, sure. But as a final translation? I feel process ought to be privileged over product, but what do I know?

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The other thing that's spiked is the temperature. Early Feb and we were already at 36C. Night temperatures are at 22C. Our year is one unending summer punctuated by a few days of deluge and a week or so of mild chill and mist.

My wrists already have mild burns from any encounter with the laptop. This summer - now - I intend to go offline as much as possible, return to pen and ink (okay, not ink; but some reasonable substitute), and try to get accustomed to having nearly no electricity.

We have to be the only people in this city to not have an inverter or a generator. Plan to keep it that way.

Half a loaf of rock & Turtle

I visited Rishi Valley recently and nothing recharges my batteries quite like an early morning climb along the Sliding Rock ridge, to discover formations I never knew when I was studying there, and to return home with not just pretty pebbles, but a entire rock!

If I'd written this a week ago, I might have said more. Instead, there are photographs.

The owl - they are a pair, actually - lives in the rafters of the senior school. One evening, when the senior school was specially opened up, I caught sight of both of them. One of them cocked her head to look at me, all puzzled. They were adorable. This one was taken one morning, when I was waiting for some teachers.

Turtle Rock from the other side looks like a gun. But on the principle that turtles are better than guns, this is the view you get.

On our way down, we had our eyes peeled for stones we could take back (we hunt stones like they were fugitives from justice). We admired green stones that were actually paving the path we were on, so we had to reluctantly leave them be.

And then we found this one. It looked like nothing so much as half a loaf of artisanal bread just lying there. We picked it up and discovered the rich red inside.

Of course I wanted it. I brought it back, too, all the way from that hill to our room, and then from RV to Hyderabad. Considering that I was also bringing back a great, big wooden chair in its two separate pieces, all bubble-wrapped and tied with rope, I think this is a piece of - what's Marie Antoinette's word for it? - cake.

Two Minutes Older: The Dying Tree

In my last column, I wrote about death and it seems I am not done with the subject. Recently, a teacher from my old school mourned the slow death of a banyan tree.

This tree had stories gathered under its aerial roots: in 1926, when J. Krishnamurti was looking for some land near his birthplace, Madanapalle, where he could set up a school, he came across a banyan tree in a valley. He was struck by the beauty of the tree and the silence of the place and over the next few years, the land was acquired and the Rishi Valley School set up.

In the years that I was there, our annual dance dramas took place under the tree. We persuaded our teachers to take a class outdoors and took them by the long way to the banyan. Everyone I know from school has at least one annual photo that was taken with the tree as shelter and background.

There was a stage made of cement, and stone benches had been placed at some distance, in a semi-circle. Beyond the stage, some roots had become secondary trees, but most always dangled and never reached the ground – I am not sure if it was because they weren’t allowed to, or because the madly-swinging children put paid to the ambitions of the parent tree.

The big banyan, as it was known – there was another one elsewhere in the school – was as much a landmark of the school as Asthachal (when we watched the sunset from half-way up a small hill) or the distinctive rock formations that surrounded us to which we gave absurd but oddly fitting names.

Such permanence do landmarks have in the minds of people that we forget that even trees must die.

For years there have been rumours of the slow death of the banyan tree. Friends who visited shook their heads in sorrow. They said the cement stage had been removed, that there were supports for the tree, but still it was dying.

I visited the school a few years ago, and I thought the rumours of its death were exaggerated: it seemed to be doing well – maybe it wasn’t as healthy as it was when I had been there, but so many things had changed so why not the tree? Besides, it could have been a matter of perception – the way childhood places often appear smaller and shabbier than one remembers.

Recently, concern for the big banyan has once again erupted. It appears that something – it is not clear what – is eating away at the tree from the inside. The main trunk is dead, so it is unable to support the branches connecting it to the surrounding prop roots. Some friends have been trying to find ways to conserve the main trunk. I’m not sure if it’s an effort worth making.

Of all the trees favoured in mythology and philosophy, it is the banyan which represents immortality, and the enlightenment that comes with the understanding of the nature of death. Its continuing existence is a fact, plain and visible: if another part of it survives, it is still the same tree, no matter how many leaves it sheds or how many roots it puts down. It demands no metaphysical leaps of the human mind – as other trees and plants do – in seeing in a seed the ghost of its parent and the promise of progeny.

In the eighty years since J. Krishnamurti first saw the tree, the big banyan has maybe three of four big prop roots in addition to the main trunk. Understandably enough, the school may not have wanted the tree to spread over a large area, and so it has always stayed in the shape most of us remember it. A banyan that cannot spread probably cannot perpetuate itself in the way it is supposed to.

For this tree to survive, it must be allowed to spread, to change its point of view, to see the world from a slightly different place. Some day, the school children will remember some secondary tree as ‘the’ big banyan, and have stories to tell about it that will also be stories about themselves. There are, after all, many ways for trees to live.

(An edited version of this in Zeitgeist, the Saturday edition of The New Indian Express.)

Rishi Valley

Fourteen Year Later

Our Volvo bus from Hyderabad is late by about an hour. I’ve been up for an hour and a half watching the dawn slide off the railway tracks that cross and re-cross the road on which we are. It is the old meter-gauge railway line that’s no longer used.

At 7.15 the bus drops us off at a village with an unpronounceable name. A van from Rishi Valley is waiting for us. We enter the mouth of the valley and watch Lion Rock standing sentinel as it always has done. As I point out landmarks to my son, the driver realises I’m an ex-student and becomes chatty.

*

As I go through the routines of bath, breakfast, assembly I’m filled with a sense of relief. I had imagined that this place would be strange, smaller than I remembered, darker and more inadequate. It most certainly isn’t that; but this feeling inside me as I let the silence seep in, is not nostalgia. Nostalgia is inherently false and tarnished. Nothing can live up to it. Being back here is not an act of remembrance; it is of a return. Something umbilical ties me to this place. It is home, so I do not resent the changes that have taken place in the time I’ve been away. In fact, I delight in rediscovering the old and marvelling at the new. I’m amazed that I’ve forgotten nothing: every tiny ritual – the silence bell before lunch, the day divided by the ringing of the big bell – the routes, names, paths and activities.

*

From the Principal’s office one can see Boat Rock – a fanciful piece of granite perched on top of a hill. Excepting only our talk, the silence is complete. If the leaves rustle, or if there is a snatch of birdsong, it is so fleeting as to be almost unnoticeable. Perhaps it is only my citified ear, used to more noise, unable to detect sounds in lower registers. Given time, I might be able to separate all of this. Even the new lab being constructed just outside the senior school building seems to rise without any sound.

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There’s been a lot of construction going on in the school. As we walk around, I can see the lab coming up and at least two other buildings on the way to the Big Banyan Tree. There is steel and cement lying about; there are construction workers. But they seem to work silently. I don’t know how they do it. No construction in the city seems to take place without a large amount of noise and dust.

In the fourteen year I’ve been away, several new buildings have come up. I’m not sure how old each of these buildings is but they seem to merge seamlessly with not only the old buildings but also with the trees around them. I had imagined that the place would have had to be scraped and raw on the surface; to go through a necessary phase of ugliness before turning beautiful. But these buildings, held safe within the nest of surrounding trees, don’t look like they have disturbed a single thing while they came up.

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On the first day I drag my son to every single place I urgently need to see: the Big Banyan Tree, the Junior and Senior Schools buildings, the new library, Asthachal (which now no longer takes place because of the mosquitoes) and a short way up Cave Rock hill. I want to see everything at once so that I will have time to see it all again, at leisure. By the end of the day, my son is exhausted. His seven year old legs have walked more than ten kilometres all told, and he’s ready to pass out. This happens every single day that we are there. We walk and walk and walk until he gets cramps in his legs and at night he’s asleep almost before he’s changed into his night clothes.

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The Big Banyan Tree was rumoured to have died. This is the tree that J Krishnamurti saw and decided he wanted his school be where the tree was. When we were in school, the area surrounding the tree had been cemented up to allow for performances under the tree. Stone benches were laid out around in semi-circles.

The benches still stand, but the cement has been removed. It appears that they were choking the tree and because the tree couldn’t put down its aerial roots it was dying. There must have been other reasons. Whatever the problems, the tree seems to be reviving now, though it looks more sparse and bleak than it used to.

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The first evening there is a dance performance. We used to have ML Vasanthakumari living on campus and the Bharatanatyam performances used to be full-length ballets done in collaboration with Kalakshetra. MLV Akka, naturally, used to compose the music for the whole ballet and sing. (I’m trying hard not to say those were the days!)

Now, however, there is no one with the stature or the inclination to do things on such a grand scale (this is a separate post altogether, this business of the education at school) and so the children put up several individual pieces, moving from Allaripu to Jatiswaram to Tillana.

The performance is in the open air, just outside the auditorium. Between each dance, the sky drops like velvet on us and I can’t remember seeing as many stars in the sky in the last 14 years. The Milky Way is clearly visible, as is Scorpio. I used to be able to name more constellations but now I can’t remember any. All around me the children take this utter darkness for granted and worry more about the dog in their midst.

The performance is, I’m afraid, rather mediocre. I feel disinclined to excuse it because they’re children. If you’re learning dance, at least the first thing you ought to get right before you’re allowed to perform, is your posture. Not one person dancing that evening got that basic thing right. Half-way through, I decide not to put my son through this any more and we leave.

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The second evening, there is a film. Nothing we want to watch, so we hang out with Vidya. Vidya and her husband, Kartik, run the rural medical centre. It is a much bigger set-up now than it ever was. This is separate from the ‘hospital’ meant for the school.

Vidya seems to do work outside of her responsibilities at school. She has some slides she must examine and write reports on before sending them off to Madras. My son has a lovely time looking through the microscope, playing with Kartik’s dinky cars and reading Asterix comics.

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Sunday is a packed day. There are matches in the afternoon – handball for the girls and football for the boys – and folk dance before dinner. After dinner, the school has arranged for a reading from my book, in the Library.

The girls match is sharper and more exciting than the boys’ football. There, the boys kick the ball with more enthusiasm and less skill, with no idea of how they’re contributing to the game. This same spirit of happy mediocrity I notice once again during folk dance.

I remember more dances than I thought I would but I notice that they’re dancing them differently. I must be getting old, but I can’t but call it a corruption. Every step, separate and purposeful is elided over and made into one continuous sloppy movement. Sunil, who is now in charge of folk dance, can’t tell the difference because he doesn’t know most of these dances. They were taught when we were in school and he wouldn’t know a right step from a wrong one. But I do and I can’t bear to watch my favourite dances being butchered the way they are. We leave for dinner and wait outside the dining hall.

*

After dinner, nearly all of the senior students turn up, in addition to the teachers. The mezzanine of the library, which has been built for such purposes, is full. I had asked earlier if I could sell copies of my book and the school had said I could.

When I stop, it is nine. After only a few questions that the teachers start to ask, there are several kids with their arms up in the air. The questions come rapidly for the next hour, some of them very interesting ones and some others that are usual but don’t sound annoying coming from these children.

One boy asks me if I feel weird hearing English read aloud. I say no, but I want to answer this at greater length. I remember that sense of embarrassment when hearing ‘My heart is beating’ from Julie. I know what he means, in a way.

There’s a question someone else asked me that I know is important but I can’t remember it now. Maybe it will come back later.

At the end of the reading, I find I’m six copies short. I tell the school office that I will courier the copies when I return.

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The next day, it’s time for us to leave. The taxi arrives at 10 and after some minor wrapping up and saying all our goodbyes, it’s time to leave. As the taxi turns on to the main road, I realise that I haven’t taken a photograph of Lion Rock at all. I hope that it will be there the next time I return and make a vow to not let another 14 years slip by before I make another visit.