Gangajal, Or One Day In The Life Of An Unknown Indian

Dear Guru,

Age is doing things to both of us. We had agreed long back in time that In Search of Solitude was the best piece of literary creation mankind had ever come across. It continues to be so till date and matters will not change in the future. Its author is the most unnoticed genius outside my circle. We also agreed that what you can express in the form of a simple but pointed one-liner, takes me more than a hundred words to "summarize". And this is probably an underestimate.

You are the one who should be writing columns in the literary supplements of well-known dailies. As far as I know, R.K. had started out writing in the Hindu. You could have done so too. But your total commitment to IL holds your energy on leash.

Note further that I need to keep revising endlessly many times whatever trash I write , while your

Nothing on earth

Let's not argue anymore on this issue. The thing was settled in the past and neither you nor I can travel back to the past to rewrite the agreement. Don't renege, unless you wish me to fly over to Chennai and settle things face to face. I will carry a stick with me, now that you carry one as well. It will not just be a war of words.

You have acquired this habit of arguing out cases long after the final judgements have been delivered in your favour. As I was telling Satchi, I had once observed that you were the greatest authority on Wodehouse that I knew. And then, instead of agreeing with me, you began to argue that there was no mistake in what I had found out. You are the only lawyer I know who keeps on defending a case after winning them.

Have you been doing this all your life, or is it a recent geriatric manifestation? What worries me is that you are infecting me with similar propensities. Only the other day, I found myself arguing with a shop owner in Park Circus Market that I owed him Rs. 1050/= when he insisted that the sum in question was Rs. 915/= only. He made me quite angry by refunding the balance as he was handing over the commodities I had purchased.

"You are forcing me to cheat you," I yelled at him.

"No, you are the one who is forcing me to cheat you," he yelled back.

We kept shouting till a crowd gathered ready to pull up the shop owner for mistreating a Senior Citizen. The situation was pretty grave and to escape being manhandled, he explained to the crowd the arithmetic in support of his position. The crowd appeared to understand what he said, but I didn't, given my poor command over numbers. They let him off. They let me off as well, but the way they kept staring at me made me feel uncomfortable.

And now you have begun to attack my already over-exhausted brain, or whatever minuscule substance resides inside my skull. My non-existent grandson is not even a doctor. Who's going to look after me?

Cruelty, thy name is Cheeniya. Sob, sob ...

oj

 

Thank you PS for letting me call you PS.

Unfortunately, I do not know the meaning of the word Pashenka. Pashenka is a character in a Tolstoy story, Father Sergius. She is a simple person who reveals great wisdom and shows the light to a great man groping about in the darkness of life. She helps him finally understand what life is all about.

Best regards.

ojaantriCk.

 

Dear Balajee,

Quite right. In fact, I am hopeful that the Postal Deparment knows God's address, now that it has taken to selling Gangajal instead of stamps. I was surprised, mind you, to see Gangajal on sale in a post office. Perhaps this is common knowledge. I had no idea though.

Best regards.

oj

 

Dear PS,

Viji accepted, but forgot who she was

ojC

 

@Iravati
First, let me thank you for this thoughtful comment

I was not sure myself if I had been able to bring about a stylistic change, however imperceptible. But I did give it a try, since I didn't know what I had been after for the last few years that I had been writing on the net. I wanted to figure out what it was that I was cooking. The fact was that I was adding all the spices in my cupboard to produce a dish that was hard to identify, even if not entirely inedible. Cheeniya refused to criticise me, which made my work ever more difficult.

You appear to have noticed a change now and, to that extent, my goal is partially fulfilled. Partially, yes, since this is the first time I tried to write what I thought a blog was as opposed to a snippet or, for that matter, any other emerging prose forms.

I had tried my hand for a few months on flash fiction and that brought in a whole lot of feed backs here. It made people happy (except Cheeniya, I am almost certain) because they had less to read. Or so I think. I gave it up, even if some liked it. I was personally dissatisfied. And I kept searching, till I recalled that Kamal invariably referred to what he wrote as blogs.

What was a blog, I asked myself and, for once, I didn't google it up. I tried to define it for myself, following Kamal's choice of topics. I could have emulated Cheeniya too, but I didn't think he wrote blogs. He calls them "ramblings". I am not sure that I agree that he is a rambler, being a great admirer of his style. Well, whatever he means by rambling, I refuse to accept his writing as examples of blogs. His best piece (in my opinion), In Search of Solitude, is not a blog. It is the Kohinoor in the IL crown, which one can kneel in front of. My way of kneeling is to make that piece my homepage in the computer. But I refuse to accept it as a blog.

And then I went out in search of a blog that didn't mind revealing its internal dynamics as well as beauty to me. I came across it here: Why I miss my less-cash days . I found a few others by the same author. After this there was no going back. I cannot define a blog, but I know one when I come across it.

Academic researches believe that more that half the battle is won once you land an interesting problem. Then you go ahead and produce variations in the way you approach the problem. If the problem is truly a good catch, then you are settled for the rest of your life. I think the same observation applies to literature. A great author finds a nagging problem to analyse first and then goes on to dress it up in the form of novels and stories. I believe this was surely true of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but it is not true of most of the authors I come across these days. Many of them do not attract me. I can't see the struggling search in their works.

I don't know how to thank you enough for these lines. I really don't know why I caught on to Erle Stanley Gardener. It could well be on account of the titles of his novels, such as Perry Mason -- Case of the Drowsy Mosquito. Not that I was ever a Stanley Gardener fan. So, the expression "Case of the" surfaced from deep down the bottom of Lethe. For good or bad, I used it. Then I dropped it. Then I reintroduced it. Thanks for your jumbo "like".

That certainly was a faus pas. How could Schubert ever be a foil to Perry Mason? That was indeed a questionable act. I have no explanation for it except to tell you that my mind was not working and I resorted to a random click. But once the music started, I couldn't exactly turn it off either. Besides, I am not particularly familiar with Liszt of Mussorgsky. Added them to my things to do list though.

Could that be the case? Hmm... I am wondering. Was it Schubert who showed me the way? Could well be the case.

Undoubtedly so.

I don't think I would have selected a lieder even if they tied my eyes. A vocal performance, even if accompanied by a piano or whatever, was the last thing that could have brought me peace of mind inside that heat and dust filled post office. By the way, you really think it was a homunculus that sat inside my pocket? I am staring at my Pixel phone right now and worrying.

I wish I knew the answer to the question. You might have guessed that the composition has undergone a good deal of changes by now. I tried to reduce its length somewhat, among other things. It rests now in my website hoping that someone someday will notice it. By mistake.

Best regards.

oj

 

@Iravati

Sorry for this unpardonable delay in responding to your thoughtful observations. I don't have anything useful to say right now either. I am struggling with ideas and only when I succeed in producing my next piece will I be ready to resume conversation, should you be in a mood to converse.

At this stage, let me point out that I agree with you about the trinity you spoke of in connection with Bond. What you call unity, I call "completing the circle". I try my level best to stick to the circle, but in the case of the present composition, I failed. Nonetheless, I put it up, knowing as I did that this was not the final version. I tried to make amends in my website, but I am not yet satisfied.

There is yet another problem that bothers me. Word length. For the genre I am after, 1500 should be the upper bound. I failed here too.

But I will be back I think.

oj