Other Names #11: Aul Singh

It was nine o’clock, while Aul Singh was having breakfast on the terrace of The Kumaon hotel under a bright sun, a large fold of the glacier in the Himalayas of the western Kuman region broke free and rolled down the mountainside, raising a white cloud of ice and rubble that blew across the valley where the hotel was located, with such force that it turned the great entrance window to dust. It was like dynamite exploding. Panic spread across all five floors of The Kumaon hotel. No one was seriously hurt except a few guests in the lobby who were cut by the hailstorm of glass. But when the crane picked through the rubble at a road nearby, they uncovered a curious object.

It was a seven metre long tear-shaped block of ice. When Aul Singh first saw the black and white grainy picture in the newspaper, he sensed a dark form inside. He had no doubt that it was protecting something inside. Since the beginning of adolescence when Aul Singh had begun to be aware of his premonitions, they would come suddenly in a wave of supernatural lucidity, like a momentous conviction, but even after all these years he couldn’t fully grasp them. On occasions, they were so natural that he identified them as premonitions only after they had been fulfilled. And the day before the avalanche he’d had one of those dreams.

He dreamed that he was getting out of bed, opening the door to an identical hotel room with the same bed with the same plank of wood at the head, the same wicker chairs, and the same picture on the back wall of the Himalayan range with all the distinct peaks marked and labelled. From that room he would go into another room that was just the same, the door of which would open into another that was just the same, and then into another just alike, and so on to infinity. He went from room to room as in a gallery of parallel mirrors until his feet could no longer keep up with the rising panic of being caught in an endless loop. He willed his feet to move faster but he looked down to find them stuck in knee-deep snow. More than an inch of snow had gathered on the same bed, the same wicker chairs, and on the thick wooden frame of the picture. That’s when he saw the man, or rather a shadow of a man just below a group of three peaks labelled Trishul. He had a staff and he seemed to be moving closer. Terrified Aul Singh tried to dislodge his feet. He dragged and clawed his way to the door and began to go back in reverse through the gallery of rooms, going back over his trail to the room where he started which he believed to be the room to reality. There he climbed back in bed and pulled the covers over his head. That is how Aul Singh found himself in bed, snuggled deep under the heavy quilt with a cold sweat that had permeated all the way through his clothes and onto the sheets.

Like on most occasions, Aul Singh didn’t know what to make of his all-seeing dream. He went over it in his head and then he remembered the man with the staff. With a small flutter in his chest which he shrugged off as just curiosity, he climbed up facing the back wall at the head of the bed. There it was, a dark fuzzy spot just under Trishul. For a breathless second, Aul Singh’s mind raced to find a rational explanation to the anomaly. On a closer look, he decided it was probably mould lodged between the glass of the frame and the print.

It was not until after breakfast, once the avalanche had deposited an inch of snow across the valley mid-summer, he realised with some horror that half of his dream, or rather his premonition had been fulfilled. The local news reported that the avalanche had in fact originated at Trishul along with a pixelated picture of the teardrop recovered at the road, not far from the Kumaon hotel. Aul Singh decided to take a nap with news of the incident fresh in his mind.

When Joan Didion said, ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’, I think she meant - the stories we delude ourselves with.

I used to think that if I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning, I’d hammer through the noon and end it with a Thud! Whack! Clanggg! before I hit the sack. But once I had a hammer, I realised I wasn’t hammering as much I said I would.

Other Names #3: Brojesh

The best way to describe Brojesh is to think of him as an old, inhospitable house at a part of town that had seen its peak more than half a century ago. It has no claim to architectural beauty yet remarkable in its thickness of walls and the fewness of windows, most of which has been grated over time. It was built to last. Without talents. Without arrogance. Read about Project Other Names here .

A road-tripper’s recipe to beach-hopping: Sri Lanka south coast

Nay-sayers said it couldn’t be done. Well-wishers said it probably shouldn’t be done. The fact that the mercury would rise to its zenith high in the peak summer didn’t stop us from travelling to the southern coast of Sri Lanka last month. After a rickety eight hour bus-ride that saw us descending into the plains from the hill country, we reached the bustling sea-board town of Weligama. If you are travelling along the same route, keeping a day in hand for the Yala National Park would seem like the most obvious choice. However, short of money and time – my fiancé and I headed straight for the holy trinity of sun, sea and sand. It would be safe to say that any road trip involves the road (duh!), a pair of trusty-ish wheels and at least one companion (who you will most likely fall out with at least once a day. But regardless the offense these silly skirmishes that start with ‘let’s stop for a cola’ have a knack to smooth itself out soon enough). Like life, which’s about the journey and n...

Other Names #15: Balwan

Settling into a chair for coffee with his friend, Balwan felt his heart race and tension creep into the tops of his shoulder, pulling the nerves at the base of his neck into tight knots. Anger vibrated in his solar plexus. But he was not upset. His friend sitting across from him was. Balwan soaked up other people’s moods like a sponge. If you’ve met Balwan, chances are you’ve already made him cry. He often described himself as someone with an exposed nerve, fine-tuned to every little flutter in his environment like an emotional weather vane. Sometimes these moods were pleasant but even those moved him to such overwhelming awe that he was often reduced to tears. A glimpse of a bird’s nest or a half-furled leaf filled Balwan with inarticulate joy. An unexpected compliment could send his mood soaring and fill him with unbridled enthusiasm. Balwan noticed details that most people missed – a heightened sense of smell and touch and sight. It was like he felt the world around him with f...

Other Names #12: Kaamkar Das

The rain pelted incessantly for six years and five months and twenty-two days over the city of Someplace. There were periods of drizzle when people stepped out but soon, they began to realise that the respite was only a forecast for more rain. At first life came to a standstill and then boredom set in. People stopped going out altogether so establishments had no reason to stay open. The public gardens were flooded and turned into veritable marshlands with crocodiles and snakes which put an end to walking. A thick layer of moss covered the asphalt under the waterlogged streets that made cars and motorbikes skid off their paths and often into death. People received their weekly supplies of grains from a government helicopter that came twice a week to drop sealed packets onto the terraces. Time stretched into infinite seconds over Someplace and its people came to be characterised by their glassy eyes, wet yellowish skin and a perennial dry crust around their mouths. Kaamkar Das was one of...

Other Names #14: Girija

Girija was a woman. It was a condition she suffered from birth. The ailment limited her to talk a certain way, dress a specific way and behave in a manner that did not draw negative attention to herself. The slightest aberrations tended to anger or at least annoy people with inevitable ease. It was especially tough for Girija because she did not see herself as a woman much. The condition for her was purely physical. It did not dominate her thoughts or passions every waking minute. If she had to put a gender to her inner world – she would’ve said that she felt like a mixture of all kinds of people and sexes we don’t even know about and she liked it that way. Eventually she came to the conclusion that it was more than the condition of being a woman that plagued her – she was also a feminist which came with a daunting side-effect in her twenties of self-awareness. It made her head pound and her stomach churn at harmless words like ‘pretty’ and ‘feisty’. But Girija rarely discussed t...

Other Names #10: Mrs. Ghosh

She sat on a wooden bench facing an empty communal pool, contemplating its green chlorinated waters, with her hand resting on the silver handle of her cane and thinking about death. The first time Mrs. Ghosh had visited Dolphin Square, she was no more than five herself. Her father, a district magistrate in the Calcutta high court and a skilled swimmer himself had unceremoniously doused her in the pool. It was the first of many days that would become her entire adolescent years. The pool was emptied and cleaned once every year in the winter. There had been numerous deaths at the bottom of the diving board but all of Calcutta’s best swimmers frolicked to the murky green pools to compete with children from nearby slums who inevitably turned out to be stronger and swifter in the district championships. Every second Sunday of the month, young people who couldn’t afford the membership fee of the government run swim club, competed against each other to earn their place by merit. It afforded t...

Footnotes from college and my holiday in Istanbul that has nothing to do with the former

The following is best enjoyed with food or beverage that's a tad bit sour, bitter or whatever seasoning that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Besides teaching me calculus and semi-conductors that have been of no future consequence, the four years at an engineering college furnished me with an elementary knowledge of scientific thinking. I was glad to learn that the minds of people (themselves a product of natural causes) was a function of the brain subject to the laws of cause and effect, like any other part of their body. And that these laws were the same as those that governed the movements of star and atom. I exulted at the thought that the universe was no more than a vast machine in which every event was determined by a preceding event so that nothing could be other than what it was. These conceptions not only appealed to my dramatic instinct; they filled me with a sense of liberation. It gave me such satisfaction to learn that the Earth was a speck of mud whir...

Other Names #13: Keimoni

In the train, Keimoni preferred to read a book to a newspaper, and not only because the size was practical. The paper didn’t hold her attention enough, and above all, it didn’t take her out of the present. The ride every day to work let her do the amount of reading she liked to take in at one time. She liked to read at home, at night, but other things. Keimoni read several books at once, each with a time and place, taking her out of the place and time in which she lived. She disappeared into books like someone running into the forest, emerging from the other side, always a bit changed from the experience of crossing over. These vanishing acts were a staple for all periods of waiting. In trains, busses, cabs, restaurants, park benches, offices. It did not matter if she was sloshed between sweaty arms of strangers in the train whose faces were less than two inches from hers. It did not matter if the light was too low or the seat already taken or if a hundred infants were screaming ...

Three salad dressings with a side of honesty

Salads. The healthy-and-mighty of all meals. The snooty accompaniment to a glass of rosé. The veritable rainbow on your plate. In Fran Lebowitz’s words, a salad is not a meal – it is a style. Well, as long as ‘style’ includes a fair amount of mud under one’s fingernails – I couldn’t agree more with Fran. Sure, it’s fashionable to eat a salad – but there’s a certain panache to going down on all fours in wet mud, rummaging through fresh lettuce pods every morning and wondering what you’re going to dress them in. While it’s far from the fashion statement that salad has come to symbolise, growing your own food definitely is a style of its own. There are many categories of salad snobs – the ingredient minimalist, the chop-it-right evangelists and the brigade of dressing-goes-first, but the only consensus between the salad factions is that you don’t actually need packaged dressing. A homemade vinaigrette made from basic ingredients lives just as happily on your refrigerator door, not to ...

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