To Disorderly Routine

I have been on a hiatus from writing for too long. For three years, I have achieved recognition for creative expression in the Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Writing Competition, each award being better than the previous one. Last year, taking my trajectory of success seriously, I reposed confidence in my ability to finally win the competition. However, attempts to feed words to my thoughts were futile; no word seemed to be the right one and the blank screen reflected an eldritch void.

Why? Maybe I owe it largely to the analytical frame of thinking that college has ushered me into – recurrently ruminating over the intent behind my words came at the expense of unfiltered expression. I was always free to write, but doubt shackled the confidence. Maybe, as a friend put it, growth is a trade-off. Everyone loses a part of themselves in college to develop something new. I lost sight of the fact that I write for myself.

In this piece, I ramble. A potpourri of thoughts and observations from a recent trip to Shimla with three others - I write to salvage this moribund platform.

P, S, V, and I did not go home during Diwali. While they might have had to opt out of elaborately crafted festivities planned by their respective families,  I simply wanted the taste of routine, that had been disrupted by the cacophony of protests at college. A Kantian form of routine, though superficially mundane, offers and instills discipline. The 7 AM alarm, the 8 AM breakfast, brunch at a dhaba, fixed classes, and timely sleep are fixed elements of constancy in a day that provide abstract solace. Iterated at the cost of redundancy, the universe has an order that will play out as it is supposed to. Investing faith in such an idea diffuses a sort of tranquility in life. However, trips like this one are also a part of the routine – systemic breaks are included within the routine to momentarily break away from the routine. Ergo we planned an unplanned trip to Shimla, and I decided to reward myself with a kink in the linearity, sorry, the wave of life, the ‘ups and downs’.

*

‘No problem at all, your room will be ready whenever you arrive’, informed Mr. Gulzar as I rang up the hotel while still on the bus to Shimla to confirm our stay since we were inordinately late. I was half-expecting a terse response. The boys were in awe of the manager’s hospitality. They said that he and I had immediately hit it off on the right note because he was a Muslim too. This realization, post some contemplation, had jolted them into a quandary – will Mr. Gulzar approve of drinking and smoking in his rooms? The cheap liquor and cigarettes were sneaked into the room shared by S and P with ease. Throughout the time spent there, it was actively attempted to conceal the goods. Room cleaning services and even delivery of water jugs directly to that room were avoided. However, the quadruple decidedly spent nights in that room, and amidst the miasma of grey smoke, stench of liquor, and plangent music, I excepted myself from the intoxication and worked on the submission for an international moot competition. Much like Mr. Gulzar, I was Muslim too.

I recall a conversation between Arvind Swamy and Manoj Pahwa in a television serial:

-          ‘Coffee is like a religion, sir. There’s no place for misinterpretation’.

-          ‘And chai is like blind faith. Good or bad, tea is tea!’. (dialogue from IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack)

Religion officiates my refusal of inebriation, like a stamp on an envelope. It is the litmus of predicated behavior from birth. Habits, tastes, and preferences are non-consensually chiseled into life. But I choose not to, to live moments not smudged by unconsciousness. These thoughts cloud my mind as I shift my gaze away from my friends’ starry eyes to look at the intermittent fireworks that speckle the midnight sky. A hirsute monkey suddenly raps at the window pane, greedily eyeing the bowl of peanuts on the bedroom table; an infant clings to its back. I hesitantly draw the curtains and get back to work; the rest remain merrily oblivious.

The next morning, we spot Mr. Gulzar performing a puja in front of a portrait of Lord Hanuman. The other three, while recovering from their feverish hangover, look at each other with baffled expressions. My lips stretch in a delicate smile.

*

Jakhu Temple, an approximate four-kilometer upward trek from Mr. Gulzar’s unostentatious manor, houses a 108-ft.-tall Hanuman statue. As we laboriously make our way through the rocky path, several returning from the temple offer unsolicited yet innocuous advice – remove your glasses, or the monkeys will steal them. We innocently oblige. S, V, and I, the bespectacled boys in the group, tread cautiously.

Two rusty bells dangle from the head-jamb of the doors of the temple. An infirm man walks out of the doors. After a short struggle, he manages to lift a young boy in his arms and help him to ring the bells. The bobs inside are never at rest; traffic of people religiously ensure to chime them while entering and leaving.  In my head, I draw a parallel to doorbells in almost every modern house (although one would invite expressions of concern, annoyance, or something else if they were to ring the bell while leaving). We walk through, tolling the bells, as if to inform God of our presence at His abode. 

Our heads naturally tilt upwards to register the colossal figure of Hanuman. But we are immediately distracted by a young couple flailing their hands dejectedly and hurling expletives at a monkey who had stolen their sunglasses. I put on my spectacles to watch the drama and cup my hands around its frame to protect it from the occurrence of a similar misfortune. ‘Mehenge the yaar!’ (they were expensive) - the lady screams at her helpless companion. Some locals, squatted near a fetid and neglected washroom, shout out their insightful remedy for the couple – get some food for the monkey and trade it for the glasses – while evidently enjoying the tragicomedy. This seems to be a routine event for them. The young man runs away and momentarily returns with a packet of Milk Bikis. The biscuits do not entice the monkey. It screeches its disapproval, and clambers away. Maybe, the monkey God permits bribery under his roof, for the tailed thieves have mastered the art of negotiating their terms over years of practice.

*

On the last day of our trip, we walked back to Mall Road after visiting, inter alia, the Himalayan Bird-Park. I shall not go into much detail about this tourist attraction. However, it was after long that I visited a place that was truly eponymous with the concept of a ‘bird-park’ – it was quite literally a park meant for birds. There were no cages, no apparent restrictions. For a long time, no one even showed up at the reception. Peacocks, fowls, ducks, and pheasants – there was no material barricade between them. It seemed that we had paid to enter their premises, for their amusement, as we carefully strolled through dainty cuttings of rocks and wood to avoid accidentally trampling on a chick.

The day had been fatiguing. We had walked more than ten kilometers on sloping roads, only to reach the tourist spots and catch our breaths before the views. We had just crossed a walkover bridge when Soham and I spotted a man trudging two suitcases and a shoulder-bag, approaching the bridge in the accompaniment of his wife and son, who followed suit. The son’s impassivity, drooped eyes, and quivering lips seemed to depict signs of autism. Both of us offered to help the family. We took the bags from the father and helped them cross the bridge with ease. The family was Bengali, and Soham struck up an affable conversation with the mother, who, I later learned, had beseeched us to study well. They thanked us and carried on; the father insisting on carrying all the bags.

S and I traverse the bridge once again, in contemplative silence. Then, he spoke first.

‘The son should have also carried a bag or two. He did not seem physically challenged’.

‘Would you have wanted your autistic son to carry any bag?’.

We catch up with P and V, and relax on a bench facing the sunset, with crossed-legs, making privileged plans for dinner, rejoicing the independence of choice at distant places from home.

*

The bus makes slow progress towards Patiala. I plug in my earbuds and rest my head across the railing, allowing a gust of cold breeze brush past my hair. A rendition of Schubert’s An die Musik floods into my ears. A crescendo gradually builds up. I close my eyes and fancy the idea of playing the keyboard; tapping my fingers against the window rails. The music is moving – it seeps away all the exhaustion, and I am enlivened out of a state of aimless rumination as I stand up to the ascension of the various parts of the composition. The man beside me grunts, and I immediately sit down and wipe my teary eyes, all damp due to the chilly wind. 

The first translation I read of An die Musik (To the Music):

For Death Himself my music shall not still

Not Death Himself any music still.

We arrive at the college campus early in the night than expected. I crash into sleep after quick dinner, to wake up tomorrow to the routine symphony of life at law school.

~ Mustafa