IN THE WINK OF AN EYE

I was eleven years old, and studying in Class VI, when I took a daring decision.

I decided that it was time I grew from a girl to a woman, with all the accompanying wiles and guiles that went with womanhood. And one of the indispensable weapons in a woman's formidable armoury, was her undisputed skill in attracting men with the mesmeric power of her eyes.

To cut a long story short, I decided to pick up the art of winking.

Because to wink successfully, delicately, without scrunching up your eyes, or squeezing your eyelids tortuously, or hamming up the whole thing like a lascivious Johnny Walker (the comedian, not the whiskey), seemed to my 11-year-old mind the epitome of the femme fatale.

But the mirror was not enough, I needed a guinea pig to practise upon.

Being essentially timid by nature, I chose a safe venue. The top deck of the red double-decker bus - L20 - that took us from safe, suburban Barrackpore to big-city Calcutta and all its dangerous fascinations. A window-seat gave me a good view of the people down below.

I chose a safe victim. I decided to bestow my virgin wink at any old man who would look up at my window, but would not be strong enough or fast enough to follow it up with any other action.

So, in one of the innumerable bus-stops on the way to Esplanade, I winked at a doddery old man who was gazing bemusedly up at the bus. Most probably he had cataract, or short-sight, but I fondly imagined him to be gazing straight at me when I WINKED - not a sly, barely-there wink, BUT A BOLD, LASTING-FOR-QUITE-SOME-TIME, EYE-PROPERLY-SHUT, MAKE-NO-MISTAKE-ABOUT-IT WINK.

The poor man hardly noticed a thing.

Now that was a wink gone with the wind.

TELL ME, WHEN DID YOU FIRST WINK A WINSOME WINK?

FOUR-POINT SOMEONE

No, the reference here is not to Chetan Bhagat’s IIT-reminiscing bestseller FIVE POINT SOMEONE. Peter Rozovsky, who writes a full-of-twist-and-turns crime-fiction blog, has forwarded an interesting four-cornered meme. Digging into multi-cornered memories and fancies, I came up with:

Four Places I’d Like to Go, or Things I’d Like to Do:

1. The British Isles. Of course, in the 1990s, most students of English Literature in India were fed on an almost-exclusive diet of British fiction (as opposed to writing in the other Englishes), and so I have grown up visualizing (and being forced to write long answers about) Shakespeare’s London (and Stratford-on-Avon), Wordsworth’s Lake District and James Joyce’s Dublin and the place near Westminster Abbey where all the famous poets are buried (to name just a few of the Eng Lit hotspots). Besides, when I was in school, my Pishi (father’s sister) got herself photographed standing beside the wax statue of Indira Gandhi at Madame Tussaud’s, and I’ve always had a yen for doing such deliciously desi touristy things myself.

2. Switzerland. The Hindi movies of our childhood might be set in Mumbai or Delhi or anywhere else in sweltering India, but most of them would zoom straight to the snowy Alpine slopes for a song. And the unskilled-in-skiing heroine would tumble straight into the hero’s arms, and the cold weather would be a nice excuse for a cuddle. So environment-friendly, na?

3. The United States. Which we called “Aay-mey-rica” in unsophisticated Bengali. Associated in my childish mind with Walt Disney and Disneyland. And a Bengali translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin which wrung out a flood of my tears. And HOLLYWOOD highlighted against the hills. And then, in university, with the Great Gatsby and the “green light at the end of the dock”.

4. And Enid Blyton’s books (like The Caravan Family and Five Go Off in a Caravan) have made me yearn to have a holiday meandering through the countryside in a horse-drawn caravan (with bunk-beds and neat shelves and a cooking stove).

Four Places I Have Lived:

1.Barrackpore
2.Kolkata
3.Mumbai
4. ----- (my imagination may fly, but the body had been fairly rooted)

Four Places I Have Been on Vacation:

1. Digha. My first visit to the sea. Digha was empty and unspoiled then. And I collected so many tiny colourful shells.
2. Darjeeling. My first visit to the Himalayas. The sharp frosty cold. The warm delicious momos. The white-crowned majesty of the Kanchenjanga peak.
3. Benares. Crowded with people making a living out of religion. Not really my cup of tea.
4. Goa. Blue sea. White sands. Quaint churches. Lovely people. Heaven!

Four Food or Drinks I Have Liked:

1. Fish. Especially freshwater fish. Especially silvery Ilish bought during a boat-ride with our entire family (father, mother, grandmother, uncle, aunt, cousins) on the Ganga on a long-ago New Year’s morn.
2. Rezala (a yogurt-based mutton preparation perfected by the Muslim Nawabs) and Roomali rotis (handkerchief thin wheat flatbread) at Shabbir’s in Kolkata, a Durga Pujo treat given annually by Baba (father).
3. The kuler-aachar (sweet-sour berry pickle) and aamsi (sweet-sour dry mango pickle) bought from the vendor with the little wooden pushcart on the long walk back from school.
4. Natural’s Ice-cream. The sweetest, creamiest, fruitiest, yummiest thing in Mumbai.

Four Books or Movies I could Read or Watch Again:

1. All my dog-eared, much-thumbed, yellow-pages-falling-apart Agatha Christies.
2. The Harry Potter series for their intricate simplicity.
3. Sholay. The drama, the comedy, the romance, the banquet of emotions. And every time I do, I never fail to cry at Jai’s (played by Amitabh Bachchan) sacrifice and death.
4. Dr Spock’s book on Baby and Child Care. Endlessly fascinating for the last eight and half years. (Just kidding).

Four Works of Art Before Which I’ve Stood (or Sat):

Since I’ve never seen any really famous work of art up-close, I thought I’d mention four works which I’d love to stare at.
1. Michelangelo’s Pieta. How can marble express such pity and tenderness?
2. John Everett Millais’ Ophelia. How can such overloading of earthy details be so ethereal?
3. Claude Monet’s Waterlilies series. How can one subject produce so many variations?
4. Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. A perspective-puzzle or a new truth?

Four Figures From the Past Whom I’d Like to Watch at Work or Meet for Dinner:

1. Shakespeare at work on King Lear.
2. Cleopatra arming herself in glamour and guile.
3. Charles M Schulz at his studio, discussing the daily Peanuts-dose of innocent wisdom.
4. Rabindranath Tagore sitting under trees with his students at Shantiniketan.

Four People I Think Might Take it Upon Themselves to Take Up This Meme:

(Feel free to alter/add/adjust at will. Anybody else can also join in).
Suranga

Kavi

Santanuda

Pradipda.

TORCH-BEARER

The multi-functional mobile phone has almost usurped the role of many a household gadget – like the alarm clock and the radio. And the torch (we never called it ‘flashlight’).

When we were children, the sturdy steel torch was inevitably present on every bedside table or drawing room cabinet. There was a fixed place for the torch in every household and it was VERY IMPORTANT always to keep it in THAT PLACE ONLY.

The torch was our first line of defence against the near-daily power-cuts (or load-shedding, as we call them here). Whenever the power went off, somebody would move stealthily but sure-footedly in the dark to the place where the torch would usually be. By the saviour-light of the torch the matchbox would be found and lanterns would be lit to keep the darkness at bay and allow normal evening activities (cooking/eating/homework-ing) to be resumed.

Whenever we went out after dark, the torch would be our faithful companion. Not only was it helpful in lighting up dark narrow gallis (alleyways), its heavy sturdiness was a reassuring weapon against probable (and imaginary) pesky ever-teasers/pick-pockets/chain-snatchers.

Especially to people like me, who suffered from chronic haywire-imagination-dysfunctionality. My frugal Dadu (grandfather) had instructed us that it was more economical to switch the light of the torch off-and-on (rather than keeping it on constantly), as that would apparently save on batteries. Though I never questioned the logic behind this theory, I was too scared of the darkness outside to obey it fully. Whenever I switched off the light, the darkness (and all its attending monsters) seemed to rush in and swamp my courage. My heart would dislodge from my mouth and return to its rightful place only when I switched the torch back on and the comforting triangle of light would flickeringly light up the path in front of me. So I usually kept the torch switched on when the road was dark and the going was heavy.

With my courage bolstered thus by the torch, it was easier to be disobedient. Sometimes it was fun to raise the torch up to the sky and watch the frailer light from my hand be engulfed by the brighter light of the full moon.

The puny white light from the light-weight mobile phone cannot really, to put it metaphorically, hold a torch to those torches of yore.

DO YOU WANT TO KINDLE A TORCH-MEMORY?

A GHOST STORY

I am not a ghost-story-fan. The pleasure of reading or listening to ghost stories has a distinctly masochistic edge which gives me no joy.

But as a newbie in the hostel (Lady Brabourne College Hostel, where I spent two rocking-and rollicking years in the new-born nineties) my friends and I were the spellbound and open-mouthed listeners to the traditional resident ghost story, part of the myth-making integral to any institution, which is passed down through generations.

The story was about the next door Medical College Hostel, where the would-be doctors and surgeons had access to corpses and corpse-parts. In a fantastic regulation-flouting (and completely fabricated, I guess) incident, a plan was supposedly hatched to scare the wits out of a rather belligerent, 'over-smart' girl. Her irate seniors put a human arm (detached from the body, or so we were told) under her pillow. The poor girl was literally frightened to death when she fumbled under her pillow in the dark and found the nasty surprise.

In hindsight, the story seems ludicrous. But told in the dimly lit staircase of our hostel, with suitably suspenseful exaggerations and pauses, it scared us to immobility and irrationality . This effect was accentuated by the additional information that the room under the staircase where we were sitting had once witnessed a suicide (which is why it had no ceiling fans - this was the logical grounding to this gothic rumour).

All of us were scared. There is a shivery thrill in getting scared if you are in group which is completely lacking if you are alone. Round-eyed and goose-pimpled, we sheltered each other as we crept up the stairs to our (thankfully) two-seater rooms, but I at least had a nasty night tossing and turning, imagining the decaying slimy-grey coldness of the no-longer-human dismembered arm under the poor girl's pillow (in my nightmare, of course, it was transferred to my pillow and, supernaturally, it creeped out to clammily and gruesomely touch me).

DID YOU EVER GET SCARED BY A GHOST-STORY? OR BY A GHOST?

ANIMAL TALES - ANTS ON MY MIND

I mean 'tales written with animal characters'. Like Tuntuni, Peter Rabbit, or Winnie-the-Pooh, or Wind in the Willows. Or Aesop's fables and other such morality tales. What every child in the pre-television age (and hopefully many in the Post-TV age, too) grew up on.

But my favourite-st as a child was a tattered copy of LALKALO (Red-Black) by Girindrashekhar Basu. This book had originally belonged to some hoary ancestor and had, according to family legend, travelled across seven seas (the river Ganga, really) with the family when they shifted from what-would-soon-become-Bangladesh to Barrackpore (which was safely and securely in Indian territory). I don't know if this was true at all, but the book looked ancient enough. I could easily smell the fertile soil of Balubhara (Full of sand), our original village home, in its yellowing pages, and trace the waters traversed by my father and his family in the faint smudges between the lines.

The legend of the book fascinated me as much as the story it told. An epic battle between the aggresive red ants and the peace-loving black ants. Like so much of heroic literature, a woman (or wo-ant) is at the bottom of it all: the luscious-bottomed black beauty, the queen's hand-maiden, who is eve-teased by a rascally red ruffian. She cries to the black queen, who complains to the black king, who reluctantly declares war to save honour.

The reds are the fighter-ants, determined to win by force or guile. But many dramatic reversals and suspense-filled moments, the black ants win. Providence, good friends like the ant-swallowing toad and chameleon, and a timely interpretation of the scriptures (which says that the red ants will subvert the order of nature and grow wings, but this will bring death to them) save the lives and honour of the black ants. The epic battle suitably ends on the battlefield, with the conquering heroes and their loyal friends gathered together for the celebratory feast, merry-making and singing lustily (with a chorus of chirping crickets) of glory.

It's a delightful mock-heroic, wonderfully narrated. Recently I saw a reprint (the original being long lost), thanked my lucky stars, and bought it for my daughters. The new version has already travelled from Kolkata to Mumbai. Maybe that's the beginning of an epic odyssey, who knows?

AS A CHILD, WHAT WAS YOUR FAVOURITE ANIMAL STORY?

FATHER’S DAY: TWO FANCY-FULL MEMORIES

When we were children, my mother provided the steadfast, solid, supporting fabric of our daily lives; while my father’s role was more of an embroiderer of fanciful and fantastic tapestry on this fabric. She taught us how to face the facts of life; he would tell us stories of whimsy, whisking us away from the cares of life.

There was a very big house near our childhood home: a huge mansion surrounded by large grounds full of tall trees and a pall of darkness and gloom (I never saw any lighted windows). There was a high wall encircling the house, cutting off a clear view but whetting our curiosity. Whenever we would pass by, especially if night was approaching, my father would tell us fantastic stories about the house actually being Count Dracula’s castle. I would shiver delightedly and listen, awestruck and wide-eyed, to baba’s (father’s) supple and succulent re-telling of the legend, longing-but-not-daring-to look at the looming, surely-haunted house out of the corner of my eye, my small hand seeking re-assurance in his. I would be scared-thrilled, and would demand a repeat-narration every time we crossed the house, especially after dark. And my father obligingly provided the goose-bumps, vivifying my imagination till it was on auto-pilot and could re-create the thrills for myself.

Another time, he took my brother and me on a Sunday picnic. Ma packed us off with sandwiches and boiled eggs, and we wandered around the picturesque banks of the Hooghly river on a summer’s day as bright as unshed tears. After a walk on the river bank, we strolled along the Riverside Road and, following my father’s restless, adventuresome fancy, discovered the cave of Phantom (the Ghost who Walks) in the middle of some unkempt bushes at a corner of an empty field. My father convinced us that THIS WAS PHANTOM’S INDIAN HIDE-OUT, and we ate our staid picnic lunch garnished with the spice of this thrilling discovery.

Baba was like that. He would pluck an off-beat leaf from the mundane book of life and fan the flames of our fancy. Thank you, baba, for igniting my imagination.

HAPPY FATHER’S DAY. DO SHARE A MEMORY ABOUT YOUR FATHER WITH US.