Under the banyan tree

Under the tender banyan tree
Who loves to sit with me,
And sing his soulful songs,
Watch the tender leaves flicker-
Come here, come here, come here!
Here we shall live
With no worries
All through this summer.


Our dreams soar sky high
Forever in the sunshine
Happy where we are
Happy with what we have
Come here, come here, come here!
Here we shall love
With no fears
All through this summer.

On Air

The way your memory creeps up before my eyes
The way you croon your favourite songs and mine,
The songs that have stayed despite the long years
Playful, naughty, sad, philosophical or just pleasant.

The songs that bring you back to me wherever I am
Wild dreams of being one with you body and soul
Spending endless hours in embraces like creepers
Despite the long sad years of absence and longing.

Though I long for our lost days with a heavy heart,
Those days of endless sunshine that were so perfect
Your sweet voice singing your favourites and mine
During all seasons and all times, every single day.

The songs that I listen on the radio this morning
Brings back a smile in this era of infinite longing.

A House for Mr. Biswas

He thought of the house as his own, though for years it had been irretrievably mortgaged. And during these months of illness and despair he was struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the audacity of it: to walk in through his own front gate, to bar entry to whoever he wished, to close his doors and windows every night, to hear no noises except those of his family, to wander freely from room to room and about his yard, instead of being condemned, as before, to retire the moment he got home to the crowded room in one or the other of Mrs. Tulsi’s houses, crowded with Shama’s sisters, their husbands, their children. As a boy he had moved from one house of strangers to another; and since his marriage he felt he had lived nowhere but in the houses of the Tulsis, at Hanuman House in Arwacas, in the decaying wooden house at Shorthills, in the clumsy concrete house in Port of Spain. And now at the end he found himself in his own house, on his own half-lot of land, his own portion of the earth. That he should have been responsible for this seemed to him, in these last months, stupendous.

A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) is V.S. Naipaul’s third novel and deals with the life of Mohun Biswas, an Indian settler in Trinidad and his struggles to have a house of his own. Born the wrong way and considered to be unlucky by his parents, his prank leads to the death of his father. His mother and the four children are separated, Mohun taken into the care of his aunt Tara and her husband Ajodha. To earn a living, he works as a painter of signs and falls in love with Shama of the Tulsi family.

The Tulsi family is a joint family with the mother Mrs. Tulsi, her two sons, her sister and family, her fourteen daughters, their husbands and children, all living under the same roof. He longs for a house of his own and builds two, one of which blows off in the storm and the other catches fire. His struggles to have a house of his own that be “unaccomodated and unhoused” is the theme of the novel.

After years of poverty and humiliation, Biswas gets a job as a news reporter and his fortunes change. He saves money and when his son Anand is humiliated by Owad, the present Tulsi patriarch, he buys a house and takes Shama and his four children there. The house has so many faults that he did not notice but then it is his own and he dies there.

The novel portrays the lives of Hindus in the West Indies and the joint family system is humorously portrayed especially the nicknames that Mohun Biswas devises for his mother-in-law and his brother-in-laws. At the same time, there is pathos in the rootlessness and humiliation that a poor migrant has to suffer in an alien land. A House for Mr. Biswas combines both laughter and tears to depict a man’s attempt to find his self and his own "privacy and space" as Naipaul himself says in his BBC Interview.

Daily

Let me watch the stars with you;

The warmth of a lovely sunrise;
Let me travel with you once again
To a home near the River Green;

Let us play in the shallow waters
Like always in a lost sacred childhood.
Let me stand with you near a grave
Lost in renovation and forgetfulness;

Let me find love once again with you;
The lost beauty of love and smiles;
Let me sit beside you in a snakeboat
As it floats across the blue waters.

Let me colour this circle of life again
With a spot of red from your hands.

Pic: ndtv

SOS

I didn't run for shelter before the storm
But kept wandering with a sinking heart;
Meanwhile you slipped out of my fingers
Nor did I get back to the real destination.

After roaming around for years, here it is,
The same crossroads and the bittersweet,
Memories of a good life lost in the long run
While a hand that offered solace is now gone.

Now the roads stretch too wide and far
Nightmarish bleak turnstiles without you
You never knew the mirage of temptation
Or how the signs I followed have led me astray.

Finally, I find courage to write these words
For the winds to carry, before I drown again.

Global

 

Dan Brown's Inferno

Dan Brown’s Inferno (2013) is quite unlike his earlier books in that here the author turns an environmental activist in that he constantly reminds the reader of the global ecological crisis and the problems of overpopulation. It reads more like GB Shaw’s plays that carry some social message or the other.

Though in the earlier novels, it was possible to suspend disbelief at the kind of code-cracking that Robert Langdon practiced, this time it becomes a little bit tedious with the population problem that is part of the discourse of the novel. He makes use of the character of a slightly eccentric scientist Bertrand Zobrist to offer a solution to the overpopulation problem and this is by creating a virus named Inferno that has got serious consequences to the entire humanity.

The apocalypse is near and the scientist being a fan of Dante has written all the codes in poetry. The allusions and history reveal a lot about the culture and heritage of art work as usual, the fun element is replaced by a seriousness quite unlike Brown. Like all Brown heroines, Sienna Brooks is also quite smart and independent but she turns mushy and cries on Langdon’s shoulder. 

Déjà vu

Monday brought its blues

The pull between dreams

And the bitter reality

When you had to face

The same music, in the past

The fear of an ending

When there’s no beginning,

Without anything to say

Except a few bitter words

And as you say my lies

What can I say except

That you have no clue

What mess you will be

When all this finishes

Because I know well

Sometimes the heaven

Offers some warning

Some strange signal

For the weary traveller

To run away for life

There are no endings

Nor any beginnings

In a love like this

Only a pervading sense

Of our seamlessness

Skeletons in the Cupboard

There is nothing left in the cupboard

Except the daily household items,

Coffee, sugar, bread and tea,

A few broken loves from the past,

A dysfunctional family of inferno

In time replaced by another

While time is spent in words

A precious gems that began

A few songs of silence followed

A few songs of remembrance

A purple riot that ran and bled

And the silence that it brewed.

Days of humdrum and misdom,

Always balanced by fantasies,

In colours of midnight blue

That brought out all old stories

The years that buried the dreams

And no secrets left except you.

Sprout

You are the sprout that demands my pelting rain of affection, my tiny green whose footsteps fill me with pride with words that come right from the heart.

You are my sprout that loves everything green and creeps over all these broken walls of old houses and old loves and broken dreams.

You are my sprout that cuts through words, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, born out of a green dream of having a name to leave behind.

Beatrice and Virgil

Yann Martel's novel Beatrice and Virgil is an allegory that represents the Holocaust using animal characters. The novel is about writer's block and has the character of the writer Henry L'Hote talking about his writing experiences and also of his encounter with a taxidermist called Henry. This metafictional novel has it all in terms of its several inserted genres including a play, an essay, a brochure, a short story, extracts from Flaubert's short story "The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator" , a poem in the form of a list and a set of imaginary situations called Games for Gustav. These inserted genres were written by the taxidermist Henry and later recreated by the writer Henry while on the hospital bed after being stabbed by the taxidermist Henry.


Just as in Life of Pi, Martel manages to create more than one dimension of the story and the story flits back between the story of animal extinction and that of the horrible massacre of the Jews during the Holocaust. Martel, through the voice of the writer Henry remembers the six million Jews who were killed during this historical event of genocide. As survivor testimonies show those who survived were no better than those who perished. Martel brings in echoes of several survivor testimonies including that of Primo Levi.


The animal characters Beatrice and Virgil are named after the poet Dante's guides through heaven and hell in The Divine Comedy, the medieval allegory about the state of the soul. From the innumerable allusions to several allegories, it can be deduced that the allegorical form was deliberately chosen by Martel. The allegory commonly spoke of the state of the soul and also gave lessons about humanity's place in the whole scheme of things. Here, Martel brings in an allegory that can be read in both ways and due to the metafictional nature of the novel, there are clues as to read the allegory in terms of animal slaughter and racial purification. Using this allegory, Martel blurs the line between cruelty to animals and cruelty to fellow-beings, showing a belief in the unity of all beings in the universe and an exhortation to live and let live.

A Spring without voices

On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring published in 1962 was about the impact of industrialisation and urbanisation on the environment . It is a fable on the environmental apocalypse of the modern age. The title denotes the silence that comes over nature as the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird species have become extinct.It was a spring without voices.

Carson, a marine biologist pointed out that the reason for this destruction of the environment in the United States was the uncontrolled use of organic pesticides such as DDT, aldrin and dieldrin used to control pest insects in agriculture. Though these compounds led to agricultural benefits, they posed serious threats to animal and human life as Carson proves by giving scientific evidence.

This book was a clarion call for greater awareness about the great destruction that human beings were causing to the Earth.

The Name of the Rose

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb. This library was perhaps born to save the books it houses, but now it lives to bury them (Eco, 396).

Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose is a historical murder mystery set in a medieval monastery in fourteenth century Italy. What moves the story forward is the attempt of a medieval Benedictine monastery to preserve the aura of knowledge within its boundaries. Such an attempt to keep a work of art hidden, in this case, the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, is not just for preserving the aura of arcane knowledge but not to destroy the order of the Benedictines. The book, which is believed never to have written or lost is in the library of the monastery but its existence is a secret as the library is not open to outsiders and functions by strange customs of secrecy. There are many secrets related to the library, which nobody know mainly because only the librarian knows about the contents of the library. The monks can only ask for titles but are not allowed in the place where books are kept. The library makes copies of the rare books with the help of illuminators and scribes but then the books are given only for that purpose. Murders happen because of this secret book of the ancients on laughter is lusted after by the scholarly monks. To investigate the murders, a Franciscan monk William of Baskerville arrives at the monastery along with his novice Adso of Melk. This monk, in a very Sherlock Holmes- like fashion deduces the truth of the matter from accidental incidents.

For us

Not wrapped in glitzy sheets
Nor given with graceful words
A gift casually made out of 
A used personal belonging

The thought behind the gift
Were purple hearts drawn
And scrawled on pages that
Looked like reminders

You could have pinned it 
And showed it with pride
Than make purple hearts
And make others laugh

The deep red of a riot
Soul colour of a shade.

Stepford

There were forgotten words and broken promises;

Hues matched, songs played and dreams shared

From a springtime of love in another sacred space

That comes back in full riot in your shining eyes.

A world that was lost for not being a Stepford,

With long hair, obedience or even a loyal heart,

A world that was built upon years of dreams

That this elemental water had lost in time.

In the meantime, our definitions have changed;

From two strangers lost in a strange dream;

Obeying rules and breaking no boundaries,

Going from day to day without any joys.

With you, I am a sun that needs to rise and shine,

That meets your mischief with a matching hue.