The trip to India has been, in a word, excellent. I visited the country after three long years and realized somewhat jarringly that it was not quite the snapshot frozen in time that I'd hoped it would be, as I wrote in a recent entry. I was dismayed to discover that Calcutta still inspired violent thoughts. I called it a "shithole among shitholes" in another entry. But the thing I love about Calcutta - and it's not often that one gets to say this about a place - is that it's always nice in hindsight, once you're out of there and tucked away safely in a better city. I liked getting to see my grandmother and my uncle to a limited extent - limited, because my grandmother's gone cuckoo with age and creepy uncle is still creepy - not creepy in the sense of being a creep or anything, but he's surpassingly naïve. There are no two ways to put it. He is naïve like someone from the Iron Age who finds himself confronted with modern technology and reverts to primal grunts and snorts. This is the same uncle whose Facebook profile I had the misfortune of discovering two years ago was his portal of choice for cheap pornography, and it took all my creative resources to apprise him that his activities were visible to the world at large and Please-Take-It-the-Fuck-Down-Before-Mom-Sees-It without becoming overtly confrontational. At times it feels like he is dumb as a brick, and now that the goodhearted jollity that had made his other faults invisible when I was growing up has given way to the sour petulance of middle age, he's rather unpleasant to be around as well, except for very short periods, such as I was in Calcutta for this time. We did lunch one afternoon with my dad's sister's family, sans my cousin, and my dad's late brother's family, including my cousin, in a last-minute family reunion that was beyond nice. Calcutta is great for family reunions in nice hotels with clean facilities. Not so much for travel qua travel.
I had planned on being in Calcutta for nearly a week while my parents flew to Bhubaneswar and back for reasons, but my allergies kicked in on the very first day, notwithstanding the 24-hour allergy medication I'd taken prophylactically, and I feared for my health if I stayed any longer and decided sensibly to flee to Bhubaneswar before the ship, so to speak, sailed. I've been to Bhubaneswar before, but we have always driven straight down to Puri. Now that I got a good look at the city of Bhubaneswar for the first time, I was thoroughly impressed. It was clean and organized and beautiful to a fault and did not just appear that way because I'd recently been in Calcutta. A gold star for Bhubaneswar.
After that, of course, I went to Hyderabad, which was like a homecoming of sorts. The city seems to have decided all at once to start on every construction project that had ever been contemplated, as a result of which it's become rather difficult to find a piece of land that isn't being actively worked upon. I'm sure it'll look splendid a decade from now, but since I don't live there anymore, I think I can live with it for now. Met up with Nicky and Nikki at a mall we frequented in the good old days, pretending that we hadn't seen each other in ages. Met up with Nanochip, whom I hadn't seen in ages. We drove down to a new mall in a corner of the city that had recently been reclaimed from Nature, admiring the high rise residential buildings that were coming up along the way. Nanochip was so absorbed by the view that he rear-ended another car. I remember thinking, "This is really happening," in the moments leading up to the crash. Miraculously there wasn't a scratch on the other car - none that the apoplectic driver could detect in the moment, at any rate - and Nanochip's car was none the worse for wear, either. A convincing bit of oration from Nanochip (who will insist he was merely begging the other driver to let us young 'uns go), and we were on our way again.
My parents are both in Hyderabad now, so the house doesn't seem as stark and lifeless as it did when I was here all by myself. It's still without piano, and there's still a distinct sense of being out of place when you wander into the living room with the intention of sitting down in front of the TV and realize that there is no sofa where once there was, and the grandparents are still pictures on the wall, as my dad said after my grandmother's passing. It sounded a lot more poignant in the original Bengali. "Shob chobi hoi gache." Things always have a tendency of sounding so much better in their original language than in the best translations. Right after my grandfather had passed, a maid we had fired long before who had nevertheless become attached to us visited us on Eid, as she often did, and burst into tears at the sight of me - presumably because I'd grown up or because a lot of time had passed or because I simply looked that awful - , and she remarked in Urdu on my grandfather's passing, "Dada guzar gaye." Something about the sound of the words themselves melted the stoicism I had erected and maintained scrupulously until then, and the eyes became moist, though I was careful not to betray it.
A lot has happened in this house. I fell in and out of love with a lot of anime and manga. (Slam Dunk has stayed with me throughout.) I aced and bombed tests. I played basketball. I had friends over. I read excellent books in certain corners of the house that still recall memories of those books, along with other incidental sensory impressions that have inexplicably lasted through the years. In short, too many things to list. I'm glad my parents decided not to sell the house when they moved back to Seattle, and I sometimes have daytime fantasies of a family I never intend to have coming down here a hundred years from now, when I'm long dead, and admiring memories of our life as in a museum, as I have admired memories of my grandparents' childhoods and the quaint realities of an age that has all but left the human memory.
That was more maudlin than I've ever permitted myself to be on a public forum. I must apologize. But the trip overall was nothing short of excellent. I got to do pretty much everything on my list. There was some consternation when I found at long last the video cassettes that putatively contained recordings from my last day of classes at Kalpa, which I'd mislaid and been searching for nearly ever since, and was told told that they could not be transferred to disk because they had become corrupted. I choose to believe that the fact that the store to which I sent the cassettes had successfully been able to transfer all the older and larger cassettes and failed to transfer any of the newer ones means that the chances that all the newer cassettes are corrupted are rather slim and it's just the store that's incompetent. I'm going to make a last-ditch effort at recovering those memories when I get back home. If that, too, should fail, it would mean that Fate has played a very cruel trick on me, as she is known to do.
I had planned on being in Calcutta for nearly a week while my parents flew to Bhubaneswar and back for reasons, but my allergies kicked in on the very first day, notwithstanding the 24-hour allergy medication I'd taken prophylactically, and I feared for my health if I stayed any longer and decided sensibly to flee to Bhubaneswar before the ship, so to speak, sailed. I've been to Bhubaneswar before, but we have always driven straight down to Puri. Now that I got a good look at the city of Bhubaneswar for the first time, I was thoroughly impressed. It was clean and organized and beautiful to a fault and did not just appear that way because I'd recently been in Calcutta. A gold star for Bhubaneswar.
After that, of course, I went to Hyderabad, which was like a homecoming of sorts. The city seems to have decided all at once to start on every construction project that had ever been contemplated, as a result of which it's become rather difficult to find a piece of land that isn't being actively worked upon. I'm sure it'll look splendid a decade from now, but since I don't live there anymore, I think I can live with it for now. Met up with Nicky and Nikki at a mall we frequented in the good old days, pretending that we hadn't seen each other in ages. Met up with Nanochip, whom I hadn't seen in ages. We drove down to a new mall in a corner of the city that had recently been reclaimed from Nature, admiring the high rise residential buildings that were coming up along the way. Nanochip was so absorbed by the view that he rear-ended another car. I remember thinking, "This is really happening," in the moments leading up to the crash. Miraculously there wasn't a scratch on the other car - none that the apoplectic driver could detect in the moment, at any rate - and Nanochip's car was none the worse for wear, either. A convincing bit of oration from Nanochip (who will insist he was merely begging the other driver to let us young 'uns go), and we were on our way again.
My parents are both in Hyderabad now, so the house doesn't seem as stark and lifeless as it did when I was here all by myself. It's still without piano, and there's still a distinct sense of being out of place when you wander into the living room with the intention of sitting down in front of the TV and realize that there is no sofa where once there was, and the grandparents are still pictures on the wall, as my dad said after my grandmother's passing. It sounded a lot more poignant in the original Bengali. "Shob chobi hoi gache." Things always have a tendency of sounding so much better in their original language than in the best translations. Right after my grandfather had passed, a maid we had fired long before who had nevertheless become attached to us visited us on Eid, as she often did, and burst into tears at the sight of me - presumably because I'd grown up or because a lot of time had passed or because I simply looked that awful - , and she remarked in Urdu on my grandfather's passing, "Dada guzar gaye." Something about the sound of the words themselves melted the stoicism I had erected and maintained scrupulously until then, and the eyes became moist, though I was careful not to betray it.
A lot has happened in this house. I fell in and out of love with a lot of anime and manga. (Slam Dunk has stayed with me throughout.) I aced and bombed tests. I played basketball. I had friends over. I read excellent books in certain corners of the house that still recall memories of those books, along with other incidental sensory impressions that have inexplicably lasted through the years. In short, too many things to list. I'm glad my parents decided not to sell the house when they moved back to Seattle, and I sometimes have daytime fantasies of a family I never intend to have coming down here a hundred years from now, when I'm long dead, and admiring memories of our life as in a museum, as I have admired memories of my grandparents' childhoods and the quaint realities of an age that has all but left the human memory.
That was more maudlin than I've ever permitted myself to be on a public forum. I must apologize. But the trip overall was nothing short of excellent. I got to do pretty much everything on my list. There was some consternation when I found at long last the video cassettes that putatively contained recordings from my last day of classes at Kalpa, which I'd mislaid and been searching for nearly ever since, and was told told that they could not be transferred to disk because they had become corrupted. I choose to believe that the fact that the store to which I sent the cassettes had successfully been able to transfer all the older and larger cassettes and failed to transfer any of the newer ones means that the chances that all the newer cassettes are corrupted are rather slim and it's just the store that's incompetent. I'm going to make a last-ditch effort at recovering those memories when I get back home. If that, too, should fail, it would mean that Fate has played a very cruel trick on me, as she is known to do.
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:)
Thx for reading :3
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