A PERFECT DAY FOR A LAZY BONG

I woke up on Saturday morning to find Łodz all yellow and gold. It was the warmest day so far since our arrival here. We had to turn off the heater in our sun-drenched bedroom and just fresh from a tropical country, that was quite an achievement.

I love sunshine. Have I ever said that before on my blog? I don’t think so. But O yes!…I luuuv sunshine. It makes me walk with a spring in my step…adds a zing to my life. With no fixed agenda for the day, I decided to take over and planned the perfect day for Darby and myself. My Friday night’s date with Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp Minor (currently, I am into most things Polish, including music composers), left me craving for more even in the morning. But this time I planned to listen to good ol’ Bocelli. As I googled for Bocelli, I also came across ‘Cinema Paradiso’ with English subtitles on You Tube. Perfect! Sure…I was going to have my kind of day. Feet up on the table and a bowl of yogurt and wheat flakes in hand, I began my cinematic adventure. And boy…I was hooked. Once again last Saturday I fell in love with the movies. It was interesting watching Phillipe Noiret in ‘Cinema Paradiso’ as the lovable and encouraging cinema projectionist in a Sicilian village, whose death makes a film maker return to his roots after 30 years of self-imposed exile. If you love movies, you will share the characters’ palpable passion for the magic called movies. Why do I say that it was interesting watching Noiret in this 1988 movie? The death of his character, Alfredo, the film projectionist, forces the return of Salvatore to his village and sets him on a journey to his childhood. The last film I fell in love with back in Kolkata was ‘Il Postino’ in which Noiret plays the Chilean poet Neruda who returns to the land of his exile, Italy, and hears of the death of the postman, Mario Ruoppolo, played by Massimo Troisi. Watching ‘Cinema Paradiso’ was thus, in a sense, like coming full circle. I can watch these two movies again and again and yet again because I find in these bittersweet tales a reaffirmation of my faith in the transcending power of art, friendship and human goodness. And, because ‘Cinema Paradiso’ tells me that sometimes you have to go back, no matter how painful it is, so that you can finally let go…because sometimes only going back can ensure liberation… because liberation is a wiser option than escapism.

My morning was a triumph. I had planned lunch outside. We had Chinese at a not-so-great place called ‘Ha Long’ on Piotrkowska. We have had a meal there only once earlier and already the joke about it is, ‘Ha Long until you stop dining here for ever?’ I would have preferred ‘The Wook’ but I wanted to save some money for my weekly indulgence—coffee and cheesecake at Café Verte. I absolutely adore this place. Tucked away in a dark courtyard off Piotrkowska, it is esoteric in spirit and generally the hub of people from the local theatre scene, although there are plenty like us who frequent it. If I were some ‘dhuandhaar aantel’, I would have done up my home in exactly the way Verte’s interiors have been done up. Its dirty rose walls are complemented by what is, to my taste, rather postmodern monochromatic photographs mounted on black frames. The whole effect is eerily semi-erotic, slightly oppressive in a very European way. In fact, semi-erotic in terms of design is something they do really well in Łodz. They even have the club ‘Łodz Kaliska’ to boast of. However, since Verte is not a club where PDA is rampant, it is even more intoxicating. The photographs on the wall test your self-control in a public place where you have just come to have some coffee. The furniture is all wood and very, very pretty, complemented by lace and candles. Quite a yin-yang place, I would say, setting off the feminine against the masculine. If any of my readers plans to visit Łodz, the Café Verte experience should be on your must-see list, particularly if you are all arty-arty. And how can I not mention Verte’s absolutely adorable waiters and waitresses, probably just four in all…all of them as cute as buttons; or the music they play there. Till date I have listened to Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell and songs from ‘West Side Story’. Joan says, ‘Not bad…not bad at all!’

AD-LIB

 

Gosh! The things people come up with. I am obviously referring to the image above.

AD-LIB

This is just to let a very cool cat know that the cups of tea are not really all that helpful. Brit tragic hero came up just now to invite me to a movie tonight at his apartment. I found the invitation obviously exciting. However, the earth came crashing down in seconds. I will be sharing the sofa with Mrs. Perth and Gregory. Darby might squeeze in as well. It won't be uncomfortable but I don't see how the arrangement is conducive to any kind of flirting. Then again if that were not enough, we will be shown a Daniel Day Lewis film which I have not seen. I have nothing against Daniel, particularly since he will always be known to me as also the son-in-law of Arthur Miller. That ups his celebrity quotient because Miller was once married to Monroe. Considering that I am becoming flippant by the hour, this piece of trivia amounts to a lot. Anyway, the sad part is that though it is supposedly a good film, it's off-putting name is 'There Will Be Blood'...that kind of scares me. Ek phool, do maali, blood and two witnesses...

OF BAUBLES, BEAUTY AND PENETRATING STARES

The train of thought in this post follows something that happened in the supermarket this afternoon—something that has become a regular occurrence in my life. For too long (and yes, I have already started complaining) the only people who have checked me out on the streets, at bus-stops, at supermarkets, once upon a time at the university, and even at my workplaces, have been women. The only exception to this is, of course, Darby (and a couple of insignificant others) and even that is not much of a consolation since Darby is seriously myopic. This basically means that I have to get really close to him for him to see me, let alone appreciate what he sees. And then again, I have no qualms in admitting that I am a ‘certain kind’ of beauty. I could look attractive, but only from…a distance.

Coming back to what I had begun with, I have always wondered why the f… do women stare at me when I walk in to a room or pass by them? I am not a Penelope Cruz in the beauty department and I dress ‘boring’. I recall an afternoon years ago. K and I were walking all the way towards the Arts building in the JU campus, passing by the numerous engineering departments. Seeing the girls looking at us and hardly finding a guy doing the same, the exasperated K had commented that the scene defied all the norms of social behaviour between men and women. She pointed out that one, it was impossible to believe that all the guys around were discussing serious stuff and, therefore, two new birds in the midst had not created a stir and, two, if they were really talking serious stuff, were we then trying to conclude that the girls had nothing better to do but show interest in us? Well, down the years I do not find this scene surprising anymore. Men check out women all the time, covertly and overtly. Women check out men…covertly and, these days, pretty much overtly as well and women also check out women.

Really, there are so many kinds of stares that one woman gives another, the sly glances, the sniggering looks, the awestruck stares…the works. I have always been particularly fond of stare no. 25. This usually comes from the matronly of the species, their knit brows a clear proof of their disapproval of any girl who does not strut the appropriate hemline or neckline. They are the ones who have never quite liked Zeenat Aman, don’t like Bipasha and are, even after so many years, undecided about Rekha. As much as I have been fond of stare no. 25, it has often proved to be my undoing. Stare no. 1 is the most common—the ‘you-check-me-out-as-I-check-you-out’ stare. This stare is usually seen at bus-stops. Imagine the following situation. Two PYTs come from two different directions and wait at the same stop, each eyeing the other with superhuman skill, taking in every detail—from the baubles around the other’s neck to the handbags and shoes. Even as they rate each other on aesthetics, either drawing inspiration or drawing flak, their eyes suffer due to intense staring from the corner of their eyes at the fashionable objects on display. This harmless ocular gymnastics continues until an even more interesting subject interposes itself between the two. The question is…can women really prevent themselves from checking out other women? I would say no. Why? I have no clue. I haven’t really asked any of my boyfriends but I am curious. Do men check out other members of their species in the same manner? Does a man actually remember what his male colleague wore to a Friday night party? I don't know a single man who remembers what his girlfriend or wife wore to a party. And here something else comes to mind. Ages ago, on an episode of ‘Koffee with Karan’ (Oh, I can see that intellect sparkling in the distance!) Mallika Sherawat seemed to have elicited despise-ridden-snorts from Karan Johar because she had actually taken the time out to observe and rate Bongo Bips’s butts as the best in the industry. I wonder how I come up with such fascinating and intellectually brilliant examples! Ignore what this ridiculous episode highlights on the surface. Scratch beneath the surface and you will find a man making defamatory suggestions about a woman who has always/already been considered by both the chauvinists and feminists in India as ‘loose’. Poor woman! She was merely answering an apparently innocuous question that was posed to her by a man who keeps asking the male guests on his show about their favourite sexual fantasies. It is such a pity that in the case of most men, their minds are often found unnecessarily located below their belts.

And now, confession time. This could sound really weird but I love women and I love beautiful women even more. I am unabashed about it. I check out beautiful women all the time—an entirely asexual enterprise that I voluntarily undertake because every time I take in a woman’s beauty, I celebrate women and whatever there is to being a woman, including our fondness for accessories. I won’t lie. I have a pronounced weakness for the likes of Monica Bellucci, Sophie Marceau, Juliette Binoche and Liv Tyler. But I would be unfair if I do not add that women of all shapes, sizes and ethnicity attract my attention more than the men do and yup, it is possible for women to check out men without having sex on their minds. On a lighter note but with a heavy heart I must admit why I added that last bit in the previous sentence. It is a case of sour grapes, you see. The cute men I do check out turn out to be (although I am completely devoted to Darby) either taken, or married and if not so, most definitely gay. Darby dearest, does this ring a bell?

TO GIRL-BONDING AND AN IRISH CRUSH

It will be totally unfair if Joan does not dedicate a post to two of her very dear neighbours in Sarnia. For matters of privacy and convenience Joan chooses to refer to them as KB and Mrs. Perth. Joan met them for the first time in Brit tragic hero’s wine party and had felt welcome instantly because of Mrs. Perth’s warmth. The fact that she turned out to be roly-poly added to her charm. There is something about people with such a physical frame. They smile a lot and it puts you at ease, making you willing to confide in them and confess. KB was a different story altogether. A man curious to know about India and its law regarding smoking in public, he had this old world charm of a cranky old academic. Turned out that he is no academic, though he is engaged at the university’s English Institute as one. This meeting led to another at the Café Verte in Piotrkowska Street which itself deserves an entire post. And ever since then, every Thursday, Joan has met up with KB and Mrs. Perth, sometimes accompanied by Darby, at the neighbourhood café, Van Helder, raising storms over piping hot cups of English breakfast tea and apple cakes.

Mrs. Perth, an Australian, has been employed in the American Studies Department since September last year and will be here till the end of this semester before she flies home to her husband. She is the mother-hen out here, brave, spirited, resourceful, energetic, generous and let Joan not forget the fact that she bakes the best Welsh tea cakes ever. Her spreads can usually feed an army and she is to blame for the recent appearance of a triple chin on Joan’s face. She is an amazing map reader, having travelled the world intrepidly on her own in her younger days. When asked why she chose to come to this country, leaving her husband behind, among the many reasons she came up with was the fact that after 30 years of moving from place to place with her husband because of his job, it was time to strike out on her own…payback time. Don’t make a mistake; she is far from a vindictive, man-hating feminist. But she is a feminist no doubt, constantly urging Joan to not let a gap overtake her career. The two of them teaming up against the men in the building is some fun that Joan will dearly miss once Mrs. Perth leaves. Some serious girl-bonding goes on between them, with one advising the other on where to buy shoes from, staring at the same craft-work and jewellery and ruing a lack of money, the two of them discussing the unpredictable nature of the ovens in their respective apartments, dissecting Naomi Wolf’s ‘The Beauty Myth’, telling each other migration stories, stories about mining wives in Australia, mothers and mothers-in-law in India, quilting and raw silk. I’ll miss you Mrs. Perth. You are a darling!

Joan’s true darling, however, is the cranky old Irishman with whom she bonds (as she would like him to believe) like an Audrey Hepburn to a Gregory Peck. In fact, Joan refers to him as Gregory and Mr. Irish Peck’s cheeks are to be seen…all flushed as he goes… ‘O, no, no, no…’ No amount of denying can save you, KB. You just love being referred to as Gregory. But there is more to the man that Joan is smitten by than his salt-and-pepper looks or his old world eccentricities. Originally, a cultured publisher of fiction from Galway, he is a small-time novelist, a published author, who loves it (but adorably won’t admit it) when Joan asks him to lend her his books. Readers, you missed the catch, did you? He is from Galway. For an English Literature fanatic, a man from Synge’s Galway is like Gregory Peck, dearies, even if he looks like Gulshan Kumar. And here, Joan happens to know someone from Galway, with Gregory’s good looks, who recites ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ like a dream, rolling his ‘r’-s like only an Irishman can. Joan has something in common with him…their love of Yeats’ early love poetry…and she could give up hours of internet surfing and all the good looking Poles in the world to hear KB recite Yeats. And so, the conversations continue, peppered with references to ‘The Dead’ in ‘Dubliners’, to Lady Gregory, to the love of books and the romance of turning over pages of a favourite book, to childhood in the 1940s’ Ireland, to man-woman relationships, to Indian men in loin-cloths and Mother Meera in Germany. His verbal fiascos with Brit tragic hero leave us in splits and we don’t want, just don’t want the homesick Gregory to leave for his dear Ireland in a hurry.

LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR

So says the Bible and so says Joan—the living embodiment of ‘Gandhigiri’ (as one of my friends suggested) in Poland. And so far, touchwood, things have worked out fine.

You see, we live in a building which belongs to the University and those who live here are mostly Visiting Professors from around the globe. There are, of course, a few Polish Ph.D students who happen to make all the noise as students all over the world are wont to do, away from the building—during weekends, at pubs in Piotrkowska Street.

Speaking of noise, here’s how we got introduced to the first neighbour we came to know. Apart from a couple of perfunctory ‘hello’s to people we came across in the elevator, we had no clue until two weeks ago about who our neighbours are. Our first taste of this came on a Sunday morning two weeks back. It was eight o’ clock then and we had just been awakened by a phone call from India. Darby, not quite graceful at any time of the day or night, literally ‘thop-thops’ his way to get the mobile and innocently awakens our neighbour in the floor below. A fifteen-minute interlude follows (not a musical one, I assure you) during which Darby continues being loud, Joan gets all housewife-ish, washing utensils with all the determination of a first-timer and a typical Sunday morning starts taking shape. The interlude over, up comes the neighbour, rings the bell and the moment the door opens begins in a sharp Brit accent, ‘What kind of a fucking noise is that? You are making such a fucking lot of noise…the noise you make is so fucking…fucking…fucking…fucking…’ You are right sweeties—after his three-and-a-half minute impassioned extempore, the f-word was the only one that reverberated. Very typically, Joan gets scared of abusive Englishman who has, by the way, not yet looked up. Very dramatic man, Joan thinks, his posture a flawless copy of some intense, brooding, hungover hero in a tragedy. Darby, very bravely manages to embarrass our tragic hero by reminding him we are neighbours, so could we please at least introduce ourselves. The three manage to relax a little, with Darby asking tragic hero to please come in and Joan offering him a cup of tea. Now, you offer tea to an Englishman and he is sold. It is like flattering a woman. No Englishman can resist a woman’s offer of a good cup of tea. So, good ol’ Gandhigiri with a cup of tea thrown in manages to salvage what might otherwise have led to violence. Joan, shameless as she is, manages to embarrass our hero even more by being all coy and letting him know, his words had almost brought tears to her eyes, and ta-da, before the Indian couple can sigh in relief at the tragic hero’s profuse apologies, they are invited to a wine-party at the Englishman’s the following Wednesday! Joan is relieved, no doubt, but doesn’t quite take to the hero until the party has been attended and keeps referring to him as ‘Dicklickson’, a perverse distortion of his surname—a la ‘Titspervert’ in ‘Bridget Jones Diary’.

Since then, Joan has come to dig our tragic hero quite a lot. He really is rather cute with the bluest eyes she has seen in any man. Turns out that tragic hero had really been a bit hungover, which is why the outburst and which is why he could not even recall whose party he had been to on Saturday evening. Tragic hero is really a very sharp man, extremely witty and a creative writer too. Is currently authoring a screenplay for some English movie to be made in Poland. That puts Joan in quite a spot. She has a thing for all creative writers and solemnly promises to be as quite as possible when she is at home. You can imagine, can’t you, what the jealous Darby’s take on all this will be…ahem…I better get going!

SETTLING IN

The Lodz we arrived in has till recently looked like one continuous layer of icing on a cake and I remember getting down from the train at the terminal and instantly turning blue. It was five-thirtyish in the evening and it was snowing hard. I don’t remember having even smiled at Guardian Angel who had come to receive us. It was only after sitting in the taxi that I had kind of recovered myself. We were taken to our modest two-room apartment in Sarnia and after a ten-minute break, taken to the nearest supermarket for our first adventure in Poland. This one looked like any other supermarket in the world (not that we were expecting anything different) but the fun part was that everything—including what was written on tins and packets—was in Polish. My congratulations to all those who are hard-core nationalists at heart!

We have survived here for nearly a month, speaking broken and accented Polish. Of course Darby insisted that I use ‘we’ in the previous sentence. The fact is that on my arrival in Warszawa, Asia complimented me on my perfect Polish accent, adding that Darby’s sounded like a foreigner’s. However, there has been a truce. Darby and I have agreed that we both speak Bengali in standard and impeccable accent.

Darby’s professional life began almost immediately after his arrival and I have for the first time since our marriage, kept his home for him entirely on my own. I do not quite hate the arrangement as it leaves me time to look around, breathe in, observe, listen, laze around quite a bit, read, write, get distracted and then laze some more. Ah, what luxury! I have started working out, eating less, drinking more, studying and teaching and let’s see where life takes me eventually. I am in no hurry. Any guesses what song is playing in my mind, right now? It is Van Morrison’s ‘I don’t want much…’